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2006-09-11 Home Front: WoT
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"Shallow, self-centered" leftist marks 9/11 anniversary
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by James Taranto, "Best of the Web," Wall Street Journal
(Boldface emphasis added.)
Gerald Ensley, a writer for the Tallahassee (Fla.) Democrat, has an Andy Rooney-esque essay titled "Yes, It Changed the World. But 9/11 Makes Me Angry." Fittingly, it appeared on the fifth anniversary of Sept. 10, 2001:
Soon, I hated 9/11. And as we observe tomorrow's fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, I still hate it. Just thinking about it makes me angry.
Not the kind of chest-puffing, red-white-and-blue anger about "How dare someone attack my country!" But more of a sullen, frustrated, impotent anger about "Why did someone have to ruin my country?"
I get angry that 9/11 spurred the passage of the Patriot Act. . . . I get angry about 9/11 because it led to overweening security measures at our airports and public buildings. . . . I get angry because 9/11 led us to a war in Iraq. . . . I get angry because 9/11 emboldened and expanded Islamic extremism. . . . I get angry with 9/11 because it hurt our economy. . . . I get angry with 9/11 because it feeds the shallow, self-centered side of me.
Look on the bright side; at least the man is self-aware!
You know what makes us angry? We live on the sixth floor, and the elevator in our apartment building has been broken for two weeks! Granted, that has nothing to do with 9/11, but if Ensley can be shallow and self-centered, so can we.
It was often said at the time that 9/11 changed everything. That turns out to have been an exaggeration. One thing it did not change is elite liberal opinion--as represented by the press, academia and the Democratic Party--which has fallen back on the adversarial attitudes it developed in the late Cold War era, which is to say the era of Vietnam, Watergate and their aftermath.
Partly, we suppose, this is a matter of intellectual laziness. But partly it is because of an illusory similarity between the Cold War and the war on terror. If you assume 9/11 was a one-off, then the terrorist threat is a distant, abstract one, easy to move to the back of your mind while arguing about such trivia as the infringement of terrorists' civil liberties.
Thus Los Angeles Times TV critic Samantha Bonar can sneer, in reviewing ABC's flawed Miniseries "The Path to 9/11," that "according to 'The Path,' the Clinton administration was too concerned with such trifles as respecting international laws and treaties, protecting civil liberties, following diplomatic protocol, displaying cultural sensitivity and pursuing larger goals (like Mideast peace) to bring down the bad guys." Which is an entirely accurate description of the Clinton administration, even if the picture takes liberties with the facts.
The italicized clause in the paragraph before the preceding one is what the experts call "a big if." Our enemies, of course, did not intend 9/11 to be a one-off; if it is, it is only because the government--that is to say, the Bush administration--has thus far succeeded in preventing another attack on U.S. soil. Liberals' blasé approach to the terror threat will be wholly unsustainable in the event of another attack. Thus, paradoxically, opposition to the antiterror effort remains alive only because of that effort's success. 
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Posted by Mike 2006-09-11 17:18||
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Posted by JosephMendiola 2006-09-11 23:17||
2006-09-11 23:17||
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