September 11th - Yesterday

For those that have been around here for the last few months, you can pretty much count on light content at TF6S on the weekends. When I do post on the weekends, I usually write some long winded thing--the bulimic approach to blogging. Even though this Sunday was September 11th, I decided instead to take the weekend off. Saturday, I spent all day with some good friends watching college football, BBQing, getting into a reserve wine collection (yeah, that's how Californians do football), and generally screwing off.

Yesterday, I drove by myself from San Francisco to my getaway up in Calistoga, CA. I sat by the pool and wrote my toast to my friend who is getting married on Saturday. By the end of the day, I swam a few laps, got a massage and finished a book. Lounging by the pool is something I needed as I've been tasked to run the full-court press at work.

I spend all year trying to put September 11th into context on this site. For one day, I felt as if I didn't have to. This is the one day where I hope that people get some perspective in their lives and, even if they are completely opposed to our responses afterwards, will shut up for one day to allow us to morn the 3,000 people who were literally, not figuratively, murdered on that morning.

So, I walk into a gas station and read the first story on the front page of S.F. Chronicle and read this:

Four years ago this morning, the nation's priorities changed.

As rescuers tore through the rubble of the World Trade Center and Pentagon, President Bush vowed that fighting terrorism would be the central focus of his presidency.

The nation has twice gone to war; more than 2,000 American soldiers have died, and many more Iraqis and Afghans have been killed. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent; security barriers have been erected; air travel has become an ordeal; and Americans have adjusted to a new way of life.

And since the late summer of 2001, not a single terrorist has struck the United States.

Instead, on the fourth anniversary of the nation's worst terrorist attack, America is confronting an even deadlier calamity, brought on by Mother Nature.

Hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- are dead along the Gulf Coast. Billions of dollars will be spent rebuilding New Orleans and the surrounding area, and the Bush administration is preoccupied with another form of disaster.

The cruel irony has prompted some to question whether the country's obsession with terrorism has left it vulnerable to other disasters. Rather than credit the administration for staving off terrorist attacks, many believe that unreasonable fears borne from the Sept. 11 attacks drove the country, and its leaders, to overreact to the terrorist threat and divert precious resources from the near-certain catastrophes of nature.

Financier George Soros told 1,000 participants in a Washington terrorism conference last week that the so-called war on terrorism has "done more harm than good. ... It has diverted our attention from other vital" missions.

Even those who remain exceedingly worried about terrorism found reason for concern after watching the response to Hurricane Katrina, which -- unlike a terrorist attack -- came with a few days' warning.

"This provides vivid insights into what (a terrorist) situation might be like," said retired Col. Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. "It makes me even tenfold more worried -- if that's possible -- than I was before."

Much has been written about the lasting legacy of Sept. 11 as it relates to the nation's foreign policy, politics and psyche. But the timing of Hurricane Katrina has also prompted a conversation about the cost of focusing on terror.

"This terrorism paranoia has (created) unbalanced priorities," said Ben Wisner, an adviser to the United Nations on disaster risk, and a visiting professor at Oberlin College in Ohio.

"People have been taught like Pavlov's dogs; when the terrorism bell rings ... people salivate. They become hyper-aware of it to the extent that they don't pay attention to other risks," Wisner said.

"We live in a continent with very severe winters, hot summer, volcanoes, coastline, hurricanes, earthquake. ... The fact is these natural hazards affect people every year and in the aggregate kill a lot of people. We have to be concerned with the big picture."

For the past four years, terrorism has been the big picture in Washington. The administration's focus on war and terror was evident as Katrina blew through the Gulf Coast. The day the storm devastated New Orleans, Bush left his vacation home in Texas and flew to California, where he delivered a speech on the war in Iraq.

So, from this I can gather that those who have decided to do something about the threat caused by people who fly airplanes into buildings packed with civilians minding their own business, is nothing more than Pavlovian response. No where in this story is the mention of an organization who openly declared war on us in 1996. Al-Qaeda is mentioned exactly zero times and it's our (the terror fighting group) priorities which are unbalanced.

While the Left continually wanders aimlessly throughout the world in search for the allusive Utopia continually denied to them by George Bush and the Republicans, I wax nauseous on these words by Mark Steyn:

the fourth anniversary of the start of the war. That is, if you believe it's a ''war'' A lot of people didn't want to, even in those first days.

...It wasn't a "tragic event" or even one of a series of unfortunate events. It was an "attack," an "act of war." I sat at the lunch counter with a guy who'd tuned out the same station on the grounds that "I never heard my grampa talk about 'the tragedy of Pearl Harbor.' " But, consciously or otherwise, a serious effort was under way to transform the nature of the event, to soften it into a touchy-feely, huggy-weepy one-off. As I wrote last year: "The president believes there's a war on. The Dems think 9/11 is like the 1998 ice storm or a Florida hurricane -- just one of those things."

I didn't know the half of it. If an act of war is like a hurricane -- freak of nature, get over it -- it's evidently no great leap to believe that a hurricane is an act of war. Katrina was thus "allowed" to happen because Bush "hates black people." The Army Corps of Engineers was instructed to blow up New Orleans' 17th Street levee so that the flood would kill the poor people rather than destroy the valuable tourist real estate.

Whatever. As part of their ongoing post-9/11 convergence, the left now talks about Bush the way the wackier Islamists talk about Jews...

...On this fourth anniversary we are in a bizarre situation: The war is being won -- in Afghanistan, Iraq, the broader Middle East and many other places where America has changed the conditions on the ground in its favor. But at home the war about the war is being lost.

I'm almost at the point of resignation that America can expect another hit in the mouth ala September 11th. Our enemies were dead right when they assumed that we would be too deluded in our self-loathing to continue with this fight. Seemingly intellegent people have gone off the deep-end, and write articles about September 11th that quote elitist U.N. officials (who apparently subscribe to the behaviorist school of psychology) that don't even mention the murderers, who are part of a well financed organization, and have plans to do it again...and again. We're beating them badly, but they are still out there waiting for us to pick-up our ball and go home short of our goal.

Then, they'll regroup and strike again. The Left, along with a significant portion of the far right, regardless of intentions, are trying to get us to stand down. We cannot let this happen.