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WSJ

BY JAMES TARANTO AND IRA STOLL Friday, September 14, 2001 2:08 p.m. EDT

Editor's note: Best of the Web will publish over the weekend, assuming there is news to report--and it's hard to imagine there won't be.

America at Its Worst Like most of our fellow Americans, we have been inspired by the show of national unity we've seen in the wake of Tuesday's atrocity. The old adage that "politics stops at the water's edge" is borne out by the sight of Sen. Hillary Clinton pledging her full support to President Bush, by the news that Bush provided Al Gore with an Air Force plane so he could return from Europe to attend today's prayer service at Washington's National Cathedral, by the sight of hundreds of members of Congress, of both parties, singing "God Bless America" on Tuesday.

But there have been exceptions to this rule, and while we don't want to dwell on them, we feel obliged to point them out. A few Democrats have been sniping at the commander in chief. "It's not a question of what he's saying. The content is fine. But the blandness with which it is delivered has caused considerable reaction," Rep. Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, tells the Boston Herald. Fellow Bay State Democrat Rep. Martin Meehan is still griping about Bush's failure to return to Washington immediately on Tuesday: "I don't buy the notion Air Force One was a target," he tells the Herald. "That's just PR. That's just spin."

College campuses are always a haven for anti-American sentiment; we remember hearing that during the Gulf War, Cornell prohibited its students from flying the American flag in their dorm-room windows. Even the destruction of the twin towers doesn't seem to have improved attitudes in the ivory towers. Up in Berkeley, the Daily Californian reports that at a candlelight vigil Tuesday night, "the crowd applauded when one speaker blasted the United States for originating state-sponsored terrorism." A letter to the editor from one Clare Fehsenfeld in the Badger-Herald, a student paper at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, asserts, "The strikes at the Pentagon (our center of war) and the World Trade Center (a monetary focal point) are telling. We had neither our democracy nor our freedom challenged, but rather our interventional [sic] and often coercive use of military and economic capital."

Other comments have been nothing short of obscene. Filmmaker Michael Moore explains on his Web site that his first reaction was to think the terrorists should have killed more Republicans:

Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California--these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!

Why kill them? Why kill anyone?

Andrew Sullivan quotes Jerry Falwell as telling his fellow televangelist Pat Robertson: "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way--all of them who have tried to secularize America--I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' " Robertson's reply: "Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted their agenda at the highest levels of our government." The mirror image of the Falwell-Robertson calumny is a press release from the Madison, Wis.-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, which declares: "The terrorist disasters of September 11 may well have been the ultimate 'faith-based initiative.' "

It is, of course, one of the glories of America that our Constitution gives us all the right to express ourselves freely. We would not dream of calling on the government to censor any of the smug, ignorant and hateful sentiments we've enumerated here. But there are times when a little self-censorship is in order, and this is one of them.

-- Anonymous, September 14, 2001

Answers

I will take a president that speaks with heart (and chokes up for real) and speaks deliberately, not a bunch of flashy rhetoric and historonics any day. Maybe I am too down to earth and that is why I can relate to the way Bush talks.

-- Anonymous, September 14, 2001

Damn, you said that well!

-- Anonymous, September 14, 2001

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