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Friend, that is a blatant appeal to emotion rather than reason.

You may be right, but you say that as if it's all bad. We're not Vulcans. Human beings should get emotional sometimes. The bumper sticker isn't so much an appeal to emotion as it is an expression of emotion. I think it is a good thing. I think getting goosebumps with love of America is a good thing. True, it's emotional. But that's not always a bad thing, Spock.

The country has been so conditioned to accept the premise that the state can protect them, despite what there independent thinking told them on 9/11, that the state saw an opportunity to grow rather than decentralize.

Another way of looking at that is to say that Americans were conditioned to believe we were safer and more insulated than we really are from terror attacks. What their independent thinking told them on 9-11 is that we are vulnerable, we don't have to accept that, and it is the proper role of our national government to act on our behalf. That's a completely sensible response. By the way, Americans also reached into their pockets--motivated in part by--gasp--emotion, and gave a lot of money to help with the suffering. And they gave of their time. And they expressed and continue to express a heightened sense of pride in their country. As we say in Jersey, you got a problem with that?

Rather than demand the punishment of the those who failed so miserably, there were appeals to abstracts (9/11 changed everything, they hate us for our freedom)

Another way of looking at that is to say that rather than respond with finger pointing and internecine fighting, America was right there with the President in his forward looking, resolute, results oriented approach to leadership in this crisis. I don't think Americans are saying don't hold anyone accountable. But they are supportive of using our precious resources to mainly move ahead. After all, we Americans are responsible for our government. We slept too. We didn't demand more. We were complacent. And I think most of us are honest about it and ready to move on and get busy.

that are almost absurd in retrospect in the context of rational discourse and conservative responsibility to the institutions we have been left by our ancestors.

I think most Americans were good to go without a lot of discourse. The President has made his doctrine pretty easy to undertand. Find em, kill em. With us or against us. Freedom vs. terror. Civilization vs. evildoers. And America will lead. End of story. Americans agree with that.

an excuse to ignore the failures of the government (let bygones be bygones) and instead embark on a new war and taste/recapture all the good patriotic feelings that come with a good solid ass kicking. (The media obliged by flashing the amoral leftists at Berkley as the anti-war movement.)

I don't agree with that characterization.

I don't expect for their to be justice in this world, but I do like to think shining light where it does not want to be shown, is the best conservative patriots can hope for politically, in a rapidly declining culture. Then just raise our kids, hope they have more freedom then we do, leave them some money, and hope the King doesn't demand our first born sons for the battles on the fringes of the Empire.

I understand your anxiety about our culture, our freedoms, and our future. That's what we all want.

"More Todd Beamers, Fewer Ivy Leaguers"

Let's have less Todd Beamers, if that means less people dying as a result of vicious attacks on American soil. The President is taking it to them, and our trained, professional killers are doing their work. Support them.

A solid, patriotic response.

9/11 for many was a metaphoric wake-up call, and will prove to be the seminal event of their political lives, just as April 19, 1993, was for me. When I started reading critiques from the gun culture, their intellectuals kept repeating that the end result of gun control was genocide.

In context, that was to say is that a culture that does not take a personal responsibility to defend themselves will perish. After reading this, Columbine and a dozen other school shootings took place to underline the point. Rather than jocks and teachers rushing two skinny shotgun wielding teens, they ran for their lives as the federalis hid in the parking lot.

The gun culture pointed to a picture from Nazi Germany where thousands are led into a concentration camp, guarded by men with unloaded weapons. You could tell because the bolts were open (see John Ross's Unintended Consequences.) The point was that people had lost their will to defend even their own lives, let alone the heard. They were led willingly to their own certain deaths.

It was like the Twilight Zone episode with the bomb shelter, and the neighbors trying to break-in. Is this what we have come, too as a society? The culture that drilled and trained for a year and caught the greatest army in the world off guard April 19, 1775 up in my neck of the woods, is long gone. What crazy bastards those SOBs must have been!

But to see a glimpse of that culture alive in Todd Beamer was to be reminded, like the first time you see a painting of Jesus and Mary, that deep within us is the love of our neighbor that will cause men to give up their lives so that others may live. Attempts by yourself to dismiss it a rational decision made after they learned their fates, or the FBI claiming that the hijackers crashed the plane on purpose, serve only as weak attempts to diminish what we all saw on TV. While three other planes 'hoped it was just a hijacking', one group was not led willingly to the slaughter.

F-16s, machine guns, trillion dollar central intelligence agencies, global hegemony...are nothing compared to an angry American who loves liberty more than life itself.

The response of the befuddled DC tax regime was to lash out, in retrospect almost irrespective of 9/11. They attacked 'states' and let the criminals escape, all the while the schemers and money men corrupted the entire process. That is the nature of war, a dirty, ugly enterprise.

Bringing the boys home, is what we, the conservative cognitive elite, must support. It is far too risky to leave them in the field for a Democratic President to go in search of monsters to destroy (see Serbia/KLA.)