What’s Wrong with this Picture? Moral equivalence is eating away at our society. Consider the following from a Fox News report on the crash of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River:

She and a friend had been to Times Square, Central Park and ground zero, where nearly 3,000 people were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks. She said she was struck by the contrast between one disaster in which so many people died and another in which everyone survived.

"It's a miracle," she said. "I guess New Yorkers can't take any more tragedy."

I have to agree with her that the safe landing of Flt 1549 was nearly miraculous. But the comparison of the two incidents is, to me at least, very jarring.

The US Air flight resulted in no loss of life by a combination of luck, God’s will, and the incredible training, skill, courage and dedication of a flight crew fully committed to the responsibility of caring for those who entrusted with them with their lives for the flight from New York to Charlotte. The flight crew had only moments to decide what to do not only to protect the lives of their charges but also life on the ground.

On the other hand, vicious cowards with no regard for human life deliberately and callously carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks. It was not a “disaster”, “tragedy”, or bad luck. It was an act of war by cowards who refused to obey even the simplest rules of warfare. In violation of every rule ever created, they deliberately and cowardly targeted innocent civilians.

A point that is ignored (or not understood) by the liberal apologists around the world (including President Obama) is that the United States was under no obligation to treat the individuals we have captured in Afghanistan and Iraq or elsewhere as Prisoners of War. In fact, under the Geneva Conventions we had and have every legal right to hold them without trial or hearing throughout the time of conflict. We also have the right to execute them as War Criminals for violating both our laws and international laws, including the Geneva Conventions, that prohibit deliberate targeting of civilians and engaging in combat or terror activities while disguised as a civilian.

Now President Obama wishes to either release these pathetic cowards or transport them to our own shores and give them the rights of citizens of the United States. The very people that they are determined to exterminate.

These cowards, from Osama bin Laden cowering in his cave somewhere, to his state sponsors in the Taliban, Iran and formerly in Iraq, to the Hamas cowards in Palestine are not willing to even stand up and fight for their cause like men. They launch (or fund) random attacks against innocents using suicide bombers and random missile fire to target civilian not military targets. Then when free countries fight back, carefully targeting only military targets and even warning of planned attacks, these same cowards and their apologists whine and cry to the United Nations about the bullies in Israel and Washington.

President Bush’s greatest success has had the unfortunate effect of allowing people to forget that there are sub-human cowards out there who are determined to kill us all, wherever we are. That threat has not changed since 9/11. We have done an outstanding job fighting it to prevent another attack on U.S. soil. Was there anyone in the world on 9/12/2001 or even 2004 who would have been willing to bet that there would not be another attack before the end of 2008?

We have now elected one of those apologists as President and his first act as President was to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and to commit that no terrorist has anything to fear from us if they get captured and no reason to give us any information. They will only be questioned gently and politely and if we offend them or hurt their feelings in any way, they can probably sue us in our courts.

I am ready right now to stand up and predict that we will be attacked again on our soil, sometime in the next four years. It is also quite easy to predict that the liberals in our media, Congress and White House will say that the fault is George W. Bush’s because he made the world hate us. Never mind that the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and the attack on the USS Cole took place under Bill Clinton’s watch and 9/11 attack was less than nine months after Bush took office. I would love to hear how President Bush 43 made Osama bin Laden hate us in 1993!

I don’t give a damn if the UN, the left, the European "elite", the dictators, and the terrorists hate us, as long as they respect and/or are scared of our power and our commitment to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

President Obama has set us on a course of appeasement that will lead only to disrespect and will create a perception of weakness. In clear and certain terms he has told the world that President Kennedy was just kidding. He has told them that we are ready to reach out our open hands and hope our enemies will open their fists and join us in a rousing chorus of Kumbaya and that we have the audacity to hope they will be nice to us now that nasty Mr. Bush is gone.

When we compare an act of heroism and life saving with the cowardly acts of wanton destruction against innocents, we empower the terrorists and encourage them to strike again.

God Bless America

Yesterday was the 67^th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Today is the anniversary of Roosevelt’s famous Day of Infamy speech. For the first time since the war of 1812 a foreign power had attacked the United States on our own soil; an act that would not be repeated for another 60 years. Roosevelt was ready, he knew before Pearl Harbor that we had to get in to the war in Europe. He knew that Japanese aggression also had to be stopped. I am not going to go into the conspiracy theories about whether he knew about the attack in advance. But there is no question that he was ready and seeking any excuse to get us into that war. He correctly realized that we had to be in the war to stop Hitler.

Roosevelt had been president for nearly 9 years when the attack on Pearl Harbor came. As the first president ever to be elected to a third term, he knew exactly how to deal with all parts of the government and especially his congress.

Fast forward 60 years to 9/12/2001: President George W. Bush, in office less than 9 months, dealing with the first direct attack on our mainland since 1812. This enemy was more difficult, not a nation-state in the traditional sense but controlling at least one country with friends and support from many others. Unlike Japan or Germany, this enemy was openly declaring intent to continue to attack us at home and to deliberately target our civilian population.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt presided over the longest and most severe economic crisis in our nation’s history and was unable to get the country out of depression. He then led us to great success in World War II, we were not attacked again and although the cost was unbelievably high, we won World War II. As a domestic president, he was arguably one of the worst ever, saddling us with bloated government programs that last through to this today.

George W. Bush presided over significant economic growth during much of his term, despite having inherited a recession from his predecessor. However, his domestic failure to control spending or to control Congress in any way has led directly to the financial problems we are dealing with today. However, like Roosevelt, he has successfully kept our enemies away from our shores. On 9/12/2001, I don’t believe any credible prognosticator would have accepted the possibility that we would have had no further attacks on our soil over seven years later.

Regardless of his failures, George W. Bush, like Roosevelt before him, deserves to be remembered for his success at protecting the people of the United States from foreign aggression.

God Bless America