9/11/2001 - Why we remember - why we must win - why the national press is now showing its true colors.
Topic: No Truce with Terror!
Three years ago today almost 3,000 people died as a result of the hijacking of four airliners and the intentional crash of three of these airliners into each of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center at New York, New York and the Pentagon (the US Department of Defense headquarters building) in Arlington, Virginia, near Washington, DC. The fourth airliner crashed in a field in Pennsylvania as the crew and passengers heroically struggled to wrest control from the hijackers, before it, too could be used as a manned missile to destroy another target in America.

I have tried several times to itemize the death toll and can't do it. There is no way to call the roll of the innocent dead from that day within the limits of a blog entry that does them enough honor. I'll just try to tell the story as best I can, instead.

I was home watching television when ABC News broke in with videotape footage of the first World Trade Center collision, and I remember thinking "What a ghastly screw-up," and wondering if the mainframe computer serving New York FAA Traffic Control had malfunctioned really badly.

Then I saw the second plane hit the second tower, and I knew that we were not seeing an accident here. I don't remember much after that, except that the Pentagon also got hit, and that FAA and NORAD grounded every nonmilitary aircraft in US airspace shortly after that.

I've heard a lot of crap about Islamist this and "desperation of the Arab street" that, and I have decided that none of it is true. Watching thousands Palestinians - men, women and children - dance in the street and sing for joy that afternoon on the TV news made me wish at that moment that I had been able to visit REAL desperation on them, the desperation hitherto felt only by the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

What started long before 9/11/2001 (only Bill Clinton couldn't be bothered to protect us from it - giving the order to whack Osama bin Laden would have interrupted his schmoozing at the VIP tent at Augusta during a golf tournament), was the decision on the part of the leading clergy of Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations, and largely covert non-clerical allies to buy enough military might and turn enough of its endless supply of poor, pissed-off kids into suicide drones in order to fight and win a Third World War with Western Civilization.

The stakes: the world. The entire world. The radical Islamists want it, but we - the industrialized West, including the Pacific Rim nations of Japan and the other Asian democracies - seem to be running most of it just now.

And we're preventing them from destroying Israel, so we Americans will have to die, too, so the Islamists can realize their old dream of killing every Jew in Israel. That's the lethal arithmetic of the radical Islamist clergy which, unfortunately, tells the average Saudi citizen what to think.

We're fighting that war as you read this.

It hasn't been declared by either side because there's a slim chance that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia can get control of its country back from the wild-eyed fanatics who are telling every Muslim with a gun and a grudge against the West that it's OK to kill Americans - just because.

If the KSA can't win this civil war of theirs - which is in progress right now - then the Saudi royal families will have little choice but either to join the radicals against us or fly off into exile, which also leaves the Saudi radical clerics in power.

And like the last World War, no one wanted to admit it had started until it was well under way.

Like the last World War, Western Europe showed a brief flutter of resolve, then decided to appease the enemy and seek what peace they could with them.

There are also important and probably vital differences between our present World War and World War Two:

The United States of America didn't wait until the war was almost lost this time - we instead chose to partner with the United Kingdom of Great Britain (and for all of me, they can assert their historic claims to France all they want now) in assessing, tracking, preventing, forestalling and punishing terrorism throughout the world.

We struck hard and decisively at our enemies this time, scattering the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and restoring Afghanistan to its people - as an example of what happens to rogue countries that harbor terrorists who attack us.

We announced that we were in this war for the long haul. For the first time since John F. Kennedy's "long, midnight struggle" speech about the Cold War, an American president committed our forces, our treasure and our lives to defeating our implacable enemies over an indefinite, long period.

We attacked where we had good reason to believe our enemies had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction and were training and preparing to attack us.

One horrible difference - unlike the last World War, the President's political opposition is milking the situation for everything it's worth, slandering the President, casting aspersions on his motives for wanting to defend our country - to get their own men in the White House and Congress.

Another ghastly, unimaginable in 1940 difference between now and World War Two - a national press determined to bend the truth, fabricate evidence, and flat-out lie to get its favored Presidential candidate elected - even at the cost of our ability to fight this war.

I'm tired of using even the tiny amount of restraint I've used so far to describe what is happening.

It's September 11th, 2004, and three years later, we're back to having an elitist corps of self-proclaimed geniuses who think they're better equipped than the voters to choose the next President - whose only qualification is the ability to give inaccurate reports of events to other people - the inaccuracy as often as not deliberate and intended to create a false impression of the events covered. In other words, lying.

These people are not only traitors to their own professional creed and the idea of a representative government with real power and real accountability, but given the chance they will become part of the tyrant class of America, along with the activist judiciary and the permanent, fradulently-elected Democratic Senate. They seem to be working incessantly to engineer an electoral victory for themselves and their friends.

We plain old Americans aren't completely helpless, though. There's a fine old trick that, if enough of us use it, works wonders.

Write down the name of every advertiser on a news program or in a newspaper or magazine that bends the truth or flat-out lies - as when forged documents were used to "prove" bad things about the President's past - then look the advertisers up on the labels of any of their products that you use, the Internet, or at the library and tell them that as long as they are paying for lies (be sure to mention which ones, and who told them), you won't be buying what they have to sell.

The future of our country depends on it.