Back when the initial furor over the Flight 93 memorial arose, I wasn't upset over the crescent of embrace that the proposed memorial was to have as its centerpiece. I figured that it was a crescent of responsibility pointing to Mecca as the source of the attack on us:
Am I missing something? Am I the only war supporter who thinks that perhaps a reminder that Islam has more than a little responsibility for inspiring and promoting the hateful version of Islam that motivated those murdering SOBs is appropriate?
It has been darkly suggested that the crescent arc points directly at Mecca and somehow this is bad.
Heck, put in runway lights that point to Mecca. Put a big arrow on the ground and remind people of the philosophical origins of that hole in the ground.
Given that this war requires Moslems to repudiate the actions of a small minority of fanatical killers, what is wrong with a little lesson that it really does take an Ummah to raise a terrorist?
In our first victory in the Long War, why pretend we don't know who attacked us?
But now the crescent is a circle:
Many people, conservative columnist Michelle Malkin and Rep. Tom Tancredo prominent among them, objected to the "Crescent of Embrace," seeing it as a sign of capitulation to the enemy. Eager to avoid controversy, the National Park Service and the architects went back to the drawing board and hastily rejiggered the plan, changing its title and adding more trees so as to turn the "crescent" into a "bowl." Critics of the original design were mostly mollified and the long march toward construction continued.
So now the memorial is not only devoid of any sense of victory by our citizens who struck back in that first dark hour of war, it won't even acknowledge the enemy that attacked us:
To those who prefer their monuments to be monumental, this may come as something of a disappointment, if not an outright betrayal. Even at this late date, seemingly ordinary citizens can perform extraordinary feats, as Flight 93's heroic epic reminds us. The problem isn't that we've run out of heroes in America. We just don't know how to honor them anymore.
What mindset could seek to force a defeat in the Iraq War and deny us our very first victory in the war that Iraq purportedly distracts us from?
Republicans who don't take the threat of radical Islam seriously are marginalized. Democrats who don't do so constitute their party's mainstream. ...
But to a large extent, the Democrats' lack of seriousness about the war we are in can only be explained by Bush Derangement Syndrome. The term was coined by commentator Charles Krauthammer, a former psychiatrist, who defines it as "the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency -- nay, the very existence of George W. Bush."
What if not derangement can explain such fever-swamp nuttiness as the findings of a new Rasmussen poll, which asked whether Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance? Among Democrats, 35 percent believe he did know and another 26 percent weren't sure. Only 39 percent said he didn't. In other words, nearly two out of three Democrats are unwilling to say that Bush wasn't tipped off to 9/11 in advance.
Our Left would deny us victory not just in Iraq where only our Left can deliver victory to our enemies, but retrospectively in the first battle we won over Pennsylvania.
The Left just can't be trusted with our nation's defense.
