One of the best things to happen to me because of blogging was discovering the work of people like Matt Welch, whose jaundiced take on the Ahnolt Ziffel debut this afternoon is a welcome palliative to the drivel the mainstream media (and politicos) have offered today.

Speaking of Welch, he posted something last week about an Andrew Sullivan comment, one of Sully's classic neo-nixonian asides about how "some liberals" were unaffected by 9/11, and so are unable to truly comprehend the growth and moral stature of our Great Leader. Welch took exception with that, and I agree. But as with any traumatic event, our reaction depends on how immediate the event was to us. A person who barely survived the attack is affected differently from someone who lost a friend or family member; a New Yorker who breathed in the noxious fumes from the collapsed Towers was affected differently than someone like myself, who could only vicariously experience the horror.

But if there was one common denominator we all shared, it was how the immediacy of an apocalyptic terrorist attack was brought home to us. That a couple dozen people, armed only with boxcutters, could cause that much damage to two American symbols, and whose murder toll was stemmed from a geometric increase only by our "good fortune" that the attacks occurred early in the morning, and one of the planes crashed short of its target, was frightening; the next attack could be far worse, and the possibility that a nuclear Armageddon would be in our future, so soon after the end of the Cold War was to make that nightmare of the 80's a more remote possibility, was a staggering thought. No one who got any sleep the night of September 12 will ever forget that feeling.

In terms of the political stances we take, however, I doubt the events of two years ago changed a great deal. Instead, what we have is an opportunism of motive involving that event, in which we continue to justify our previous positions based on our collective national reaction to that tragedy. Those who viewed John Ashcroft as a threat to civil liberties saw the Patriot Act as one such step along the path to ending due process, while those who support placing Palestinians into bandustans used the "war" on terrorism as a justification for their views. The ways in which 9/11 changed everyone, such as our tolerance for increased searches at airports, or our increased focus on Islam, are shunted aside for the time being, while everyone resumes the debates we were having ten, eleven, twelve years ago, about the proper uses of U.S. power, about support (or opposition) for Settlements on the West Bank, about the role of government in our daily lives.

Needless to say, Iraq is viewed by both supporters and detractors of the President through a prism unaffected by 9/11; with little concrete evidence of any connection between the perpetrators and Saddam Hussein, we play a little game, with hawks calling for war based on the perceived nuclear threat of Hussein, and doves questioning whether any action was called for due to the non-existence of WMD's, but everyone knowing that Hussein's ouster would have been on the table even if the terrorists had gotten lost on the way to the airports, and/or if Al Gore had received a fair count in Florida. Andrew Sullivan, no doubt, would still see a Fifth Column lurking under every tree in Cambridge, while I would still be making snide partisan remarks about the President's shortcomings. The President gets no credit from me for disingenuously making the case for war, for going in with little in the way of international support, and for not preparing for the aftermath, but no one voting in 2000 should have been surprised he would take us to war with Iraq on even the slightest pretext, nor can anyone reasonably claim that President Clinton (or President Gore) would have steered us in a different direction.