Daniel Henninger, Op-Ed columnist for the Wall Street Journal, the most White House-friendly editorial page in the country, is depressed over our democracy's improving health:


It is one thing to disagree with the decision to go into Iraq, to oppose it and abhor its most painful consequences.  It is something else, as some have done, especially in Congress, to withdraw and withhold support for a presidency amid war and to work to thwart virtually every aspect of its war program in Iraq and everywhere.


I love how "to disagree with the decision to go into Iraq, to oppose it", " is acceptable to Daniel, but "to withdraw and withhold support for a presidency amid war" is somehow a bridge too far.  But this is how neoconservatives play the "free speech" vs. "patriotism" game.  You have every right as an American to oppose the war.  But if you're vocal in your opposition, you'll have your love of country questioned.  You have every right to try to stop a war you think is hurting your country.  But if you do actually try to, you will be branded as a terrorist-sympathizer, an "appeaser", and a traitor to your country.  Essentially, to exercise the freedoms that make this country worth fighting and dying for, undermines those fighting and dying.  What's the point of the fighting and dying, again?


This is not opposition in normal political times.  This is not Social Security reform; it is not a capital-gains tax cut.  It is a war, or whatever euphemism one wishes to use to describe resisting the up-and-running forces that planned 9/11, London, Madrid, the foiled airline-bomb plot and all the other murders of innocent civilians whose crime was that they affronted radical Islam.


You see, for Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal, political passion should be reserved for keeping your taxes low.  You should take to the streets for a "private" account of 2% of your Social Security earnings.  When you should stop getting involved in your nation's politics is when your government makes war in your name.  When the stakes are raised, that is exactly when you are supposed to cash in, and walk away from the table.

Because if you raise your voice...well, WHAT exactly?  Why is it that the more militaristic our country becomes, the more fragile it supposedly is?  Why is it that the better we get at killing abroad, the worse we get at hearing dissent at home?  Why is our government more afraid of being criticized by its citizens than being attacked by the foreign enemies it lectures us about day and night, week after week, year after year?  And why is this administration so much better at defeating its domestic political opponents than the foreign terrorist opponents who took down the Twin Towers?  This is a "war" president"???

Mr. Henninger, ever the consummate 9/11 fetishist, closes his piece with yet another well-lubricated tribute to Ground Zero, the saving grace of the Bush Administration:


Since September 11, the most uplifting thing I have seen as I walk daily to work past the 16-acre site has been the constant, truly constant, stream of people who come there year round—in the bitterest, windy days of February—to stand outside the galvanized steel fence and look in.

My myth is to believe they are filling the world with more gravity and moral seriousness about September 11 than one might have guessed from the downward spiral of our politics since that day.


I also "walk daily to work past the 16-acre site."  I see the people who travel here to visit Ground Zero.  They have the blankest looks in their eyes you can imagine.  Ground Zero is but one more tourist attraction to them.  Little kids point and giggle at nothing in particular, while their parents wrestle with huge, mysterious maps they can't seem to decipher, let alone refold.  Girlfriends each take an arm of the local cop "guarding" this empty square, and ask for a quick picture—all smiles, making sure the "hallowed ground" behind them is perfectly framed, and the flash is on.  Maybe if George W. Bush and his minions had decided to unite this poor country of ours since that horrible day, the site would be treated with the reverence Mr. Henninger projects onto these half-hearted voyeurs.  But that time is passed.  It is his "myth", indeed.