THE WORST DAY IN OUR HISTORY?

I intended to mention 11 September 2001 but it occurs to me that a person justifiably could believe it to be 4 November 2008, when the wholesale ruination of the U.S. was set in motion by a dim-witted electorate.

No, I want to confine comment to September 11, and I have to do it following a rich crop of very eloquent words; words about acts of heroism that day, of pity for several thousand murder victims, and, as difficult as they are to follow, exhortations for forgiveness. Consider those said.

I wish to return to the subject of the colossal unpreparedness of whatever passed then as our national resources of security, intelligence, and investigation and the criminal negligence of business organizations that, through stupidity and carelessness, actually abetted the vicious criminals in their heinous plans and execution. Also useless were our systems for reacting to attacks, for after the Trade Center disasters, there was still time to shoot down the plane that struck the nerve center of our defenses, a place virtually surrounded by fighter aircraft, not one of which came close to destroying it.

For a moderate Democrat - remember those? When did they all turn rabid? - I thought George W. Bush was a decent president, but what I still have difficulty in forgiving him is that by the afternoon of that hellish day or, at the latest, the first thing the next morning he had NOT cleaned house in all the offices and bureaus and agencies that were supposed to guard us against such atrocities. Wholesale firings and accusations of ineptitude were in order. Furthermore, he immediately should have set the country's legal apparatus against certain airline companies and other firms that made it all possible.

Militarily our defenses were deplorable, so when budget-hunting politicians want to cripple defense expenditures, at the expense of titanic welfare waste, land on them like angry falcons.