My 9/12 Post

So I watched a lot of the 9/11 five year anniversary things yesterday and over the weekend. Horrible day, I suppose that goes without saying, and something I hope to never have to live through again. I thought about doing a little 9/11 post marking the day, but that seemed to be well covered by virtually everybody else in the country so I left well enough alone.

After all was said and done one thing seemed to be missing yesterday in particular, and that was a simple “thank you” to the President and his team for doing everything they could to prevent another attack on our homeland. I don’t think any of us can begin to imagine the difficulty of the job that has been forced on them by history, and certainly each and every one of us could find fault with some or several specific actions. Still, how could “thank you” not be one of the most often communicated thoughts yesterday? Is it possible to find a country that is more full of ingrates than ours?

Sorry, I suppose that was rude, but in all candor it isn’t completely inaccurate. Back in the early weeks after 9/11 President Bush told us that it was going to be a long war. We all talked about how we needed to remain united as a country, and in our grief we found hope and confidence in the single sense of purpose that united us around our common cause; and just to be clear, that cause was to kill Islamic terrorists.

Five years is a long time, and a lot has been written and said about what we should and what we shouldn’t do. In many cases we’ve had some excellent debates about strategy (Should we invade Iraq?), and tactics (When does harsh treatment cross the line to torture?). Sadly though, this debate has too often devolved into accusations that are fully beyond the pale.

Famous beagle loving bloggers have supplanted their genuine disagreement with emotional tirades motivated more from a disappointment in the administration’s position (insert joke here) on gay marriage, than on any responsible view of the President’s motivations for actions taken in the war. Lefty nut cases claim that “our civil liberties are being stripped from us every day” in one breath, and then in the other decry what they term as the President’s use of fear to move his evil agenda forward. These dolts, who hold their oxymoronic views so preciously never seem to be fully aware of the outrageous irony of their position. We’ve been subject to idiot charges of Koran abuse, and politically correct debates about just what we should call our enemy; Islamists, Arabs, Islamofacists, Terrorists and others. Did we actually debate what we called the Japanese after Pearl Harbor? Nope, we fought them to an inch of their very lives, and didn’t relent until they begged for an end.

The most recent example of the left’s idiocy in their ongoing circus performance titled, “Why Nobody Will Ever Trust Us With National Security” would be the Plame affair. Recall that this whole sorry event began with a moronic column (“I spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea”) by a neer do well career diplomat, was published in the country’s “newspaper of record”. The column, not only mis-represented the actual findings of the trip (as did Wilson’s own report to his superiors who after reading his findings came to the exact opposite conclusion from what he had drawn), but also contradicted the findings of British intelligence. Worst of all, the idiot Wilson it seems, ended up as the one person most responsible for “outing” his supposedly undercover wife from a role at the CIA which many people in Washington knew about anyway.

Regardless, the left thought they had Cheney and Bush where they wanted them and a political witch hunt was born.

And what do we have now that all is said and done? Well, Wilson has been returned to the fringes of credibility where it seems most people had classified him prior to his rise as the Great Libby Hope, the special prosecutor has charged one administration official for forgetting the details of his busy appointment calendar, jailed one journalist for not telling him what he already knew, and let the one guy who broke the law the prosecutor was assigned to investigate go free.

Well done!

Which is why it is so important to say “thank you” to the president and his team. Our precious lefty’s, who spent the cold war on the wrong side of history, make much about the importance of dissent, and if their’s was a cause focused on dissent they’d be correct. Unfortunately for them, true dissent is so much more than name calling, protesting and inviting maniac ayatollah’s to speak at Harvard. True dissent is not formed in the words, “no, asshole”, but rather in the words, “no but”. As in “no we shouldn’t invade Iraq, but instead we should do……..”

In true form, the left has decided that the effort involved in responsible dissent is just a little too much for them to muster. It seems that they’ve decided that it is far better to spend their days enmeshed in Clinton idolatry and Bush hatred than to actually contribute to the defense of the western traditions and culture that they claim to hold so dear. In doing so, they’ve knowingly made the war on terror that much more difficult for President Bush to lead and for our country to win. In my view, the reason for this is because the left recognizes their own culpability in allowing terrorism to gain a strong hold in the world, and they’ve decided that it is far better to live with this evil than to admit the failure of their world view by joining in the good fight and defeating the throat slitting bastards.

I’ve been critical of Bush’s policies in the past. As I’ve said many times, when a country goes to war, it must follow a path of total dominance and destroy the enemy completely. Doing so requires us to ignore the pleas of the hand wringers who worry about Koran abuse and due process for enemy combatants, and do what is necessary to win total war. President Bush, a decent man I think, has tried to find a middle road between these two views and has ended up with the expected; hatred from a left wing that will never accept his legitimacy, and less than total victory over an enemy that is committed to killing us.

Still, the thought of Algore or John Kerry as our leaders in this battle is a reality far too traumatizing to even consider. More to the point, while we’ve not been successful in stabilizing Iraq, and continue to hang on to a very delicate situation there, the fact remains that we’ve been free from attack on the homeland for the past five years. Nobody, absolutely nobody, considered that such a success was possible on 9/12/01.

For this reason, I say thank you Mr. Bush, and I hope you take time to say it as well.