Terror War All But Forgotten On Home Front

By Mark Steyn - September 11, 2005 - Chicago Sun-Times

About a week after (9/11/2001), one of my local radio stations held a fund-raiser and this is how their trailer for it opened. Cue the terminal-illness-movie-of-the-week soupy piano. Then:

"After the tragic events of Sept. 11 . . ."

And, by the time I'd heard it half-a-dozen times, I retuned the dial and never listened to the station again.

It wasn't a "tragic event" or even one of a series of unfortunate events. It was an "attack," an "act of war."

George W. Bush has seemed oblivious to this constant attempt to ignore that we are at war. As our President, he should not have been, but he was. He even played along with the effort, focusing his energies on "important" things, like Social Security. Don't get me wrong, Social Security is important, but it pales in significance compared with the war for our very existence that is reflected in the war against islamofascicsm.

In the process of using the phrase "war on terror" instead of "war on islamofascism", Bush aided the Main Stream Media in changing the context. "It is not a real war" became the underlying theme. It is sort of like the war on drugs, an annoyance but not a serious threat to our existence. Bush then makes it worse when he goes and focuses on Social Security. He completed the process of trivializing the war in Iraq.

He is now paying a price for this tragic mistake. If it is a trivial war, why not get out? Sounds reasonable. Except the problem is not that it is a trivial war. The problem is that Bush has botched the process of keeping America focused on what is important. That is his job. For reasons that are completely different than the MSM, I believe Bush is doing an incompetent job on the war. He has earned his current low job ratings. However I can see nothing he is willing to do that will change this in the short run. At this point, it will have to wait until the next 9/11, and the horror of that day will be a gruesome price to pay for Bush's mistake.