Tuesday September 11, 2007

911PALOOZA! Jim Lileks celebrates Nineeleven by telling us Bogie and Jayne Mansfield would have been on his side and you Commie punks can have James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. Then he predicts that someone will make a shallow joke about him -- but it's the wrong shallow joke! Poor fellow hasn't been right about much of anything:

It seemed right away like it would be a big war, three to four years – Afghanistan first, of course, then Iraq, then Iran.

Instead, it's been a short five-year occupation and no boom-boom in Iran. Sigh. It's amazing what power tortured English Lit grad students exercised over President Bush and a mostly Republican Congress.

Norman Podhoretz also looks back in anger, adding Nixon, who "did not sound an opposing call to fight on to victory," to his list of traitors, along with McGovern, Archibald Cox, and the Internet, which has enabled "virtual demonstrations" as an "all-too-effective substitute" for real ones -- there have been plenty of those, but to admit that would give the Internet a pass and vitiate Podhoretz' shadow thesis that everything went to hell after Making It fell off the best-seller lists.

Melanie Phillips goes for discarded Andrew Sullivan talking points:

The liberal West, which worships at the shrine of reason, does not understand that ideas can kill. As a result Britain, Europe, America, and Israel have all left the battleground of ideas undefended, allowing the advance of falsehood and hatred. Worse still, our intelligentsia and media often act as an Islamists’ fifth column.

If "undefended" means "defended by such as Melanie Phillips," I can sort of see her point.

Around the time of the original attacks, I recall, there was a lot of talk about getting the people who actually sent the planes. The list of targets quickly expanded well beyond that, of course. Six years later, conservatives paint bull's-eyes on everything outside their own shrinking sphere of influence. A grim anniversary, indeed.