Sorry, Ash.

As a severely humor-impaired person, I'm going on the assumption that that's straight, and not another hand 'im the wowser.

For what it's worth, I get, from time to time, just as exercised as you do -- I just don't have your lyricism. And sometimes I Just Don't Get It, and get hauled up short, with perfect justification.

As for US vs. Them -- Them picked it. I'm a bit of a militarist, as you've probably noticed. This has a curious effect: I'm not impressed by the ability to kill people. Killing people is easy; it happens all the time. A "weapon" is just a gadget for applying enough energy to overload the target's systems. By that definition, every participant in an industrial economy is oversupplied with weapons, starting with that 1.5 megagram bludgeon out there in the garage.

Pournelle pointed it out: the deaths at the WTC add up to, what, a month of trafic fatalities? -- nothing, in the general scheme of things. And the WTC buildings were already starting to give trouble, with noises being made of demolition or major repairs -- don't think they ever made much money. In the long run, blowing them up might be doing us a favor. As a nation, one of the things the United States is really good at is killing people -- Indians, Germans (twice), Japanese, Vietnamese. Wholesale lots, and with the reinstatement of the Marine Snipers and oh-so-quiet reactivation of sniper training, at retail. Value Added Death...

So I have trouble understanding people who are impressed by it. There's enough background distrust of the Government and Jews (quiet anti-Semitism) that the "Palestinian people" and the "Arab World" have had the total destruction of Israel in their grasp for fifty years. And they keep blowing it. Literally. No matter how liberal anyone might be, it's hard to be sympathetic to people who seem to like blowing up what can only be described as innocent bystanders. Never mind -- Osama bin Laden and the whole Wahabi sect have decided -- the Only Way[TM, pat. appl for] is to destroy the West.

I decline to be destroyed.

And if I'd like to have Ashcroft dressed in a robe and turban and dumped in the line at Dulles, well, chalk it up to a sense of irony. [Maybe I have some...]

But I get real, real tired of Left-Liberal cant. The Communists used to use the term "political maturity" -- that is, anyone who disagreed with them was doing so out of childish ignorance. The current Left-Liberal attitude seems to be that anyone who disagrees is doing so out of either stone stupidity or actual malice. On another forum we're discussing Michael Bellesisles, who as near as I can tell went ahead and made up reams of research out of whole cloth, simply because he was contemptuous of the "right" -- thought nobody would call him, because Left-Liberals would have no reason to, and the "right" was too stupid to figure it out. Didn't happen that way.

And I think a lot of the things corporations do, and are required or allowed to do, are open to huge challenges -- but I'd like to see the challenges made on real grounds, not by the Socialist mistake of conflating "corporation" with "rich person". Many, many of the problems we have with Corporate Behavior derive directly or indirectly from Leftist requirements for ever more and larger tax collections. Our taxes are taken strictly as money; in order to tax it, you have to value it, and in order to do that you have to put a price on it. The result is "knowing the price of everything, and the value of nothing", as the saying goes. Also known as the Law of Unintended Consequences.

In other words, It Ain't That Simple. All other slogans are either wrong or oversimplified; but sometimes you need simple.