We Have Met the Enemy

and he is us.

But the years go by, and the mood shifts. You didn’t have to be “alert” to spot Maj. Nidal Hasan. He’d spent most of the last half-decade walking around with a big neon sign on his head saying “JIHADIST. STAND WELL BACK.” But we (that is to say, almost all of us — and certainly almost anyone who matters in national security and the broader political culture) are now reflexively conditioned to ignore the flashing neon sign. Like those apocryphal Victorian ladies discreetly draping the lasciviously curved legs of their pianos, if a glimpse of hard unpleasant reality peeps through we simply veil it in another layer of fluffy illusions.

Update:

In response to a later Mark Steyn musing called Muslims for Choice? Jonah Goldberg posted an email he got earlier from an ex-Muslim. It’s worth a read.

About That Bow

I mentioned to my mom on the phone tonight that the fact Dear Leader bowed in Japan is no big deal. I stand by that. Bowing is not a breach of protocol. Presidents have been bowing overseas for over two hundred years.

But… It seems that The One continues to get cracking advice from those great protocol advisers He hired. Or He is just that dumb on his own. It’s so hard to tell anymore.

“Kyodo News is running his appropriate and reciprocated nod and shake with the Empress, certainly to show the president as dignified, and not in the form of a first year English teacher trying to impress with Karate Kid-level knowledge of Japanese customs.

I ask you: Would anybody even care if He bowed if He were a president who showed signs of liking the American flag?

Update:

Ramirez seems to wonder the same thing.