From Scott Adams’ The Dilbert Blog:

Now, since I know from the comments that many of my readers are – inexplicably – also troglodytes, allow me to include a disclaimer here. I’m way more hawkish than you are. It just doesn’t look that way because my thinking is that if a bully punches you, you should run away. Later, when he’s asleep, put a bullet in his head and leave the gun in his little brother’s crib so it looks like a sibling squabble. In other words (again, for the troglodytes) being tough doesn’t require being stupid. It’s totally optional.

I’m not pro-Iranian or anti-American. I’d pave the rest of the world to save my American cat. The only thing I oppose is muddy thinking. If we need to send Americans into harm’s way, I want reasons and I want a full discussion of the options. Excuuuse the fuck out of me for asking for them.

Adams has captured in two short paragraphs the frustrations that many moderates have felt for the past six years, and his final line shows how far the pendulum has swung towards the extremists and their absolutist demands.

With intentional irony, I call for stamping out intolerance in our politics.

Earlier today, Michael van der Galien posted at The Moderate Voice “Why ‘Pre- and Post-9/11′ Should Be Banned From Vocabulary” which brought to my mind something I wrote back in January of this year here at, Random Fate, “America as an idea and an ideal“. It is long so I won’t duplicate the entire post here, but the key passage that reflects the ideas of Michael’s post is:

What are the fundamentals?

The Founders had recently overcome, at the time they wrote our Constitution, through actions that included secret meetings and covert actions against the legitimate government of their lands, a government that claimed to have the power to inspect any private home or other property without any restraint. Abuse of this power was the rationale behind the requirement to have judicial review and approval of search warrants.

Yet, somehow, after more than 200 years of survival, the actions of a few fanatics on September 11, 2001, are a justification to many, not solely members of the current Bush administration but apparently including many in America as a whole if comments are to be relied upon, that the philosophy that has survived 200-plus years should be cast aside because “the world changed on 9/11.�

As I have written before, many times, the world did not change on 9/11/2001, only our perception of the world changed.

We, the United States, had been attacked several times before 9/11/2001, but we didn’t notice because either the attacks did not succeed (the earlier attempts to bring down the World Trade Center in New York by truck-bombs in the parking garage), or only foreigners were killed (the car-bomb attacks on embassies in Africa).

We only panicked when the deaths were those in the United States itself. Now in the “land of the free and the home of the brave� as we so proudly proclaim in our national anthem we shit in our pants and give up yet another essential liberty every time the administration cries “terrorist� or bin Laden issues another taped proclamation.

Do your own math, but it easily comes out to this: So much for being brave OR free…

Actions speak louder than words.

Through our actions we show who we really are, regardless of any ideas we claim to follow.

Sadly, the same themes are still being played for political gain, and our actions belie the ideas we claim to hold dear, destroying America as an ideal.

Today, The IndePundit concluded a post on the changes in how the United States will be treating those declared “enemy combatants” with the words, “Stand by for a flood of ‘I question the timing’ remarks from certain quarters…”

Yet how can we NOT question the timing, when for years now the government has been acting completely contrary to the ideas underlying our nation, not the least of which is the rule of law?

How can we NOT question the timing, when the “war on terror” has been used cynically for political gain?

How can we NOT question the timing, when on the occasions that President Bill Clinton ordered missile strikes against terrorist targets THAT timing was questioned by those now demanding unquestioning obedience?

The world did not change on September 11, 2001, only our perception of it, and that perception has been manipulated by those who had lost the tools of fear with the fall of the Soviet Union. Those tools of fear are in no small part responsible for many of the ills that plague us now because they prompted actions that were counter to the ideals that our nation once represented.

We are repeating those mistakes, and we only have ourselves to blame.

Technorati Tags: commentary, September 11, War on Terror