9/11, Twelve Years On

It’s hard to know what to add this year. Nothing feels all that surprising anymore — and yet, this year, the insanity in need of remark seems to be layered on as thick as ever.

Twelve years after a band of homicidal Jihadi scumbags flew aircraft full of people into buildings full of people, we’re on the verge of supporting al-Qaeda-linked “rebels” in Syria. (Yes, they really are that bad. No, really. Seriously. I’m not kidding.) We still don’t have answers or accountability regarding four Americans who, after repeatedly pleading with the State Department for increased security in preceding months and having their requests denied, were left to die in Benghazi a year ago today, when special forces who could have reached them were ordered to “stand down”. We were told the Benghazi attacks were a spontaneous uprising triggered by a YouTube video critical of Islam, only to learn that the attackers were well armed and had clearly planned and coordinated the attack — a fact that was known at the time, but not disclosed. Meanwhile, a “Million Muslim March” — whose purpose presumably includes asking Americans to exercise ever-greater cultural sensitivity — has been scheduled on the most culturally insensitive date I can imagine. If there’s any hope in all that’s happening on this twelfth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it’s in the “2 Million Bikers to D.C.” ride that’s also happening today, and the fact that its attendance appears to outnumber the former event by something in the neighborhood of 880,000 to 21. Gotta love these guys (and gals). Bless their rugged, patriotic hearts.

In the chronicles of local ineptitude: a 9/11 memorial ceremony at New Jersey’s “Empty Sky” memorial (which I posted pictures of last year) was unceremoniously cancelled without the families who were to attend being notified. *sigh*

That’s all I’ve got for this year, for now at least. I may add more later. Most of what matters to me, I’ve already written about in previous years:

My Previous Years’ 9/11 Posts

2012: 9/11, Eleven Years On

2011: A Plea, Ten Years After: Please, Open Your Eyes ~ Ten Years Later: 9/11 Links

2010: 9/11: Two Songs

2009: Tomorrow is 9/11 ~ My Experience of September 11, 2001 ~ 9/11 Quotes

2008: 9/11, Seven Years On ~ 9/11, Seven Years On, Part 2 ~ 102 Minutes that Changed America

2007: 9/11, Six Years On

2006: Soon, Time Again to Reflect ~ 9/11 Observances ~ 9/11 Observances, Part 2

2005: I Remember

2004: Remembering and Rebuilding (went offline with the rest of mac.com; I may repost it someday)

Bill Whittle's Voter's Guide to the Republican Party

Not to be missed: Bill Whittle’s latest and greatest Firewall. Everything you wanted to know about those mean, nasty, evil, really not very nice Republikkkans, but were afraid to ask:

(via Phineas at Public Secrets, care of @sistertoldjah)

Ten Years Later: 9/11 Links

I’ve posted my own 9/11 reflections here.

Following are links to some of the most stirring writing I’ve seen today. I’ll continue adding to this list as I go.

Never forget. Never submit.

This YouTube video should make every decent person sick: Counter-demonstrators forced to disperse, while Islamic Supremacists holding signs that call for “Jihad” and declaring “Islam Will Dominate the World” freely spew their rage and burn our flag outside the U.S. embassy in London on 9/11/2011:

James Delingpole commented on this at Ricochet, in: “Western Civilization to barbarians: ‘Please. Come right in. The gates are wide open…’

9/11 is now “National Grandparents Day”! No, really.

Dana Loesch: “My 9/11 Awakening”

Sundries Shack: “9/11, The New Tet”

Ezra Dulis: “9/11: The Hijackers Were Soldiers, The Speech Police Are Terrorists”

@bapartofmylife: “9/11 is a Day of Mourning”

Perfection Under a Red Umbrella: “10 Years Later, Ground Zero & The Pentagon, Hallowed Ground of Flight 93”

GayPatriot: “In Memoriam - James Joe Ferguson Lost Ten Years Ago Today”

All I could remember was how happy Joe always was and how that cheer was infectious to all of his friends and colleagues. I would miss that cheerful influence on me. Joe had made the choice to live life to the fullest extent possible. He was the model of the optimistic American who knows no frontiers and no bounds. He was doing more than his fair share of contributing to a better society.

Mark Steyn: From “Let’s Roll” to “Let’s Roll Over”

And so we commemorate an act of war as a “tragic event,” and we retreat to equivocation, cultural self-loathing, and utterly fraudulent misrepresentation about the events of the day.

Larry O’Connor: “9/11 Was Declaration of War”

Ed Ross: “The Legacy of 9/11 is about much more than terrorism”

Andrew Klavan: “When Hollywood Hit Rock Bottom”

John Nolte at Big Hollywood: “September 11th: My Thanks to Joel Surnow and His Fellow Hollywood Subversives”

James Lileks: The Lake and the Sky

Lots of good stuff to catch up on

I have more writing in mind that I hope to get to, including posting some brief post-election thoughts that I’ve been mulling over. Meanwhile, I’ve been occupied by the flood of particularly worthy and interesting writing by others that the election seems to have prompted. Following are some highlights that I’ve bookmarked with the intention of pointing them out, including some sober and probably sorely needed self-assessment from libertarian/conservative thinkers:

WSJ: Same Old Berlin Wall

One benefit of a Democratic Presidency is that it will expose the myth that U.S. disagreements with our nations are all the fault of the Bush Administration. Take the failure of NATO, and especially Germany, to supply more troops for the war in Afghanistan.

…

The Continent’s free-riding on U.S. security while criticizing the way that security is provided predates the Bush Administration and will outlive it. President Bush has mainly provided Europeans with an excuse for refusing the kind of cooperation they’d rather not provide anyway. Mr. Obama has promised a multilateral surge of troops into the Afghanistan-Pakistan front. He may find, like Mr. Bush, that most of those troops will have to be American.

James Lileks reminisces in “SuddenlyEnlightenedLand”:

Hey, remember after 2004, when the interior of the country was viewed with deep suspicion for its insufficient interest in a John Kerry presidency? Crude maps called it JESUSLAND, a place opposed to liberty and education. Well, shuck my corn and call me Orville: the red part of the country has been reduced to something that looks like a mild case of contact dermatitis.

The solid block of flyover Christiansts who spend every Sunday hopping up and down so they can get a head start on the Rapture appears to have turned into enlightened change-agent lightwalkers, and in a mere four years. Or, the people in the middle of the country weren’t all weirdoes who still harbored a grudge against the Renaissance, and viewed the coasts as they were greedy remoras fastened on the Real America. In any case, no one will make mocking maps of them now.

I remember well the mocking of “Jesusland” that immediately followed the 2004 election, from the supposed standard-bearers of “tolerance” and “diversity”. It was one of the experiences that helped clarify for me that only certain kinds of diversity are to be embraced and celebrated in the contemporary multicultural order, and that certain utterances get an exception from the usual concerns about “hate speech”. I felt deeply ashamed of fellow Californians who I saw engaging in this disparagement of their countrymen, this tarring with a broad brush of stereotypes that would surely be condemned if applied to any other culture or group of people. The sight of a “Can we secede yet?” sign enthusiastically brandished at a San Francisco protest that broke out after the election filled me with gloom and despair. I heard people on the left threaten both before and after the election that they would leave the United States — move to Canada, Europe, or some other such haven of decency — if Bush were to win (or “steal”?) a second term. I heard the same threat repeated again before this year’s election, both from celebrities such as Susan Sarandon and from others around me. Katie Granju had a good response to that kind of talk, I think:

[I]f your civic investment in American democracy is so weak that it hinges on one single candidate or issue or election, then you probably would be happier elsewhere anyway…

As for the outcome of those threats/promises back in 2004, I feel entitled to complain that of all those who vehemently insisted that they were leaving the country, not one of them has sent me a postcard. Because they’re all still here!

Lileks continues:

The lesson, as always, is that things change. Things will change again. And I expect that the GOP leadership will conclude that since things do change, they can sit back and wait for it to happen again. Which is a recipe for ensuring that the next such map has a thin red line like the one you used to use to open a Band-Aid.

There does seem to be a risk of taking political pendulum swings for granted. Pendulums can get stuck, you know.

More from Lileks in “Monday delights” (see the original post for the accompanying graphic):

Conservatives cannot help but be saddened and left out – the only possible event that could lift their spirits right now would be a headline that said REAGAN, BACK FROM THE DEAD, EATS BIN LADEN AND CRAPS TAX CUT, but pictures like this reminds the right that no one was ever this happy about Bush, even when the love was at its zenith. No one put him with George, Abe and Frank before he took office. Really, he was just The Next Guy, a caretaker in a post-history world. People forget how much “compassionate conservativism” stuck in the craw back then; the party’s own standard-bearer modified the terms in a way that managed to insult, mischaracterize, apologize, and reshape the debate all at once. It would be like a Democrat running on a program of “Logical Liberalism,” and not knowing why his own followers found the catch-phrase unhelpful.

Anyway. There are rumors of new Executive Decrees, which include magic Federal dollars for stem-cell research that uses human embryos - if you have any objections, you hate science - and a ban on domestic drilling and nat-gas exploration in public lands in Utah. (If you have any objections, you hate the environment.) The two form a nice mirror image: the former was a ban put in place to preserve a particular definition of human life; the latter is a ban lifted to preserve the environment. Again, it’s understandable: we only have one Utah, but we can always make more people. As long as they don’t live in Utah.

Will executive unilateralism remain a bad thing, a threat to our rights, or suddenly gain favor with old critics? Hmmmm. Cue the Jeopardy! theme. That’s a stumper

Mark Steyn: The Death of the American Idea?

While few electorates consciously choose to leap left, a couple more steps every election and eventually societies reach a tipping point. In much of the west, it’s government health care. It changes the relationship between state and citizen into something closer to pusher and junkie. Henceforth, elections are fought over which party is proposing the shiniest government bauble: If you think President-elect Obama’s promise of federally subsidized day care was a relatively peripheral part of his platform, in Canada in the election before last it was the dominant issue. Yet America may be approaching its tipping point even more directly. In political terms, the message of the gazillion-dollar bipartisan bailout was a simple one: “Individual responsibility” and “self-reliance” are for chumps. If Goldman Sachs and AIG and Bear Stearns are getting government checks to “stay in their homes” (and boardrooms, and luxury corporate retreats), why shouldn’t Peggy Joseph?

He’s got a point.

Along that line, a particularly sobering assessment from the inimitable P.J. O’Rourke: “We Blew It”. As I’ve said before, I generally part company with O’Rourke on issues of war (roughly speaking, he’s more of a “Big ‘L’ Libertarian”) but he does make good points on a number of other topics.

Tim Ferguson:

[M]aybe this is again the early 1930s, ushering in 20, 30, 40 years of soft socialism and cynicism about markets, a bent for the bosom of the organized state over the seemingly fractious pursuits of individuals. It did happen before in America. If hard times instead freeze opinions in place, then we may be looking to a long haul.

Short term or long term, what is to be done by those still enamored of an America “conceived in liberty”?

(Hat tip: Instapundit)

On a related note, Fred Smith wrote before the election, on Oct. 15th:

A world where economic interests are disenfranchised - indeed, even de-legitimized - is a world that will have little regard for economic - and, thus, indivdiual - liberty.

Accompanying all of this, fresh threats from a seemingly forgotten enemy: Via ABC News: Osama Bin Laden promising an attack that “Will ‘outdo by far’ the attacks of September 11” and will “change the face of world politics and economics”.

A promise that al Qaeda, in its present state, is capable of carrying out? — or just bluster? Let’s hope we won’t have to find the hard way.

Berkeley Supports Our Troops

At Zombietime c/o Instapundit: lots of encouraging pictures from a March 22nd rally in support of U.S. troops, which was held at the same Berkeley Marine recruiting center that has been a frequent focus of antiwar activists. Slightly old news at this point, but worth a look.

"Keep your Burqa, I'll keep my clitoris!"

My kind of feminist!

At Tim Blair's (hat tip: Instapundit)

Pamela Bone: "Muslim sisters need our help"

A deeply-bowed, indebted tip of the hat to Instapundit for pointing this article out.  It is without a doubt one of the best pieces of work I have had the good fortune of reading in a long while, and I'm so glad not to have missed it.  By all means, please do "read the whole thing" as Glenn suggests!

IN Tehran in June, several thousand people held a peaceful demonstration calling for legal changes that would give a woman's testimony in court equal value to a man's. The demonstrators, most of them women, were attacked with tear gas and beaten with batons by men and women from Iran's State Security Forces, according to Amnesty International.

Iranian women may not travel without their husband's permission but they are allowed to wield a truncheon against other women.

Do you think women in Western countries marched in solidarity with the Iranian women demonstrators? Of course not. Do you think there are posters and graffiti at universities condemning the Iranian President? Of course not. You know, without needing to go there, that any graffiti at universities will be condemning George W. Bush, not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (I concede Bush is easier to spell.)

You know, before you get there, that at the Melbourne Writers Festival starting this weekend the principal hate figures are going to be Bush and John Howard. You know there will be many sympathetic references to David Hicks but probably none to Ashraf Kolhari, an Iranian mother of four who has been in jail for five years for allegedly having sex outside marriage and, until last week, who was under sentence of death by stoning.

Thank goddess, as they used to say: a few Western feminists have begun to wonder why women who once marched for women's rights are marching alongside people who would take away even the most basic of those rights.

It has bothered me for a long while now that Western feminists seem to have been largely and conspicuously silent on issues of women's rights in the Muslim world, and on the subject of precious advances in that arena that have been made and ought to continue to be made in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.  Ironically, such feminists have often chosen to instead focus their ire on the very country and culture whose efforts have made most of those recent liberating advances possible.  It does seem to me that Western feminism has taken a passive and obedient back seat to multiculturalism's demand that we pander to notions of cultural equivalence, which I find has worrisome implications for women elsewhere in the world and for the future success of freedom at large.  I sincerely hope we'll start to hear more from corageous, independent-minded feminists like Pamela.

Penn Jillette: My Kind of Nutty Wack-Job

I've gone and gotten hooked on Penn Jillette's weekday radio show recently, thanks to the podcast that enables me to catch it out here in the Bay Area at times when I can manage to listen. In addition to being frequently hilarious, Penn very often has interesting things to talk about and insightful things to say about them. To borrow terms in which Penn frequently describes himself: He's my kind of nutty libertarian atheist wack-job.

Monday's episode regarding the pro-immigrant / "Day Without Immigrants" rallies held around the U.S. was especially good, and Penn managed to express almost verbatim what I've been thinking on the subject.

Open up the borders entirely. Let anyone in. In order to do that -- in order to let anyone in -- you have to stop running a socialist country.

Given sufficient attention to security concerns, I'm all in favor of there being a reasonable legitimate means for immigrants to enter the U.S. and petition for and obtain citizenship. It's been said so often as to have become a cliché, but it's an accurate one: We truly are a nation of immigrants -- and who are we, once in the "club", to shut the doors? Immigrants, on balance, contribute far more to this country than they take, and I think we should welcome anyone who wants to come here and contribute to and be a part of this way of life we've defined with open arms (though unlike some advocates of open immigration I think it's reasonable to expect immigrants to assimilate to some extent). It should come as no surprise, however, that this desire for openness to immigration comes into conflict with the desire many people have for our government to guarantee citizens a growing array of social service provisions. Having the latter only lends fuel to the otherwise specious counter-argument that immigrants are a net drain on resources and here to take more than they give back.

On a related note: Given that there appears to be a fair amount of overlap between those who advocate on behalf of immigrants and the folks who continually insist that the U.S. is such a dreadful place to have to live, I can't help but wonder how such people proceess the fact that there are so many people who want so desperately to come here and live in this supposed cornucopia of crises that they routinely endure great hardships and take great risks in order to do so. Do they simply think these people have been misled about the promise of America?

Seems like if it was that big a disappointment, word would eventually get around and the immigrants would stop coming in droves. And yet, they keep coming. Fancy that.

Protests and Counter-Protests in D.C.

As anti-war, anti-Bush, and, it appears to me, anti-U.S. protestors descended (from the moral high ground?) on Washington D.C. yesterday, I found it heartening to see counter-demonstrators making their own appearance in support of our country, our troops, and our fight. I wish I had been there to stand with them.

Instapundit has linked to various efforts to photoblog the day, here and here. Boatloads of interesting pictures at Ed McNamara's site and also at this blog.

I'm having trouble getting Blogger's image upload support to work at the moment, so I hope these folks won't mind my linking a few pics directly.

UPDATE: More pictures at Instapundit.

International A.N.S.W.E.R.: Authentically anti-war, or “pro-war, but on the other side”?

MORE: Pictures from the San Francisco rally.