- In Defense of the '90s by Jacob Weisberg, Slate
- Ours to Lose by Lawrence F. Kaplan, New Republic
- Bush Team Wallows in Self-Praise by Bill Press, CNN
- Keynote Address by Bill Moyers
- And How Much Blame for the Fourth Estate? by Molly Ivins, Creators Syndicate
- Bad News Bearers by William Saletan, Slate
My pal Buzz Dixon recommends this link to an article about things like bio-terrorism, chemical warfare and other so-called weapons of mass destruction. It's by a retired military weapons expert who says that such tactics are not as easy nor as lethal as some think. In other words, it's a fear-calmer, and it's about time someone wrote one.
In a week, it'll be two months since we all stared open-mouthed at the scenes of destruction on "The Day of Infamy." Is it just me or do phrases like, "Everything has changed," uttered as gospel at the time, now seem a bit overwrought and hysterical? Things have changed in the sense that things always change, and we have a lot of issues before us that weren't there in the good ol' days of Gary Condit and Monica. But I think we're a lot closer to normal now than we thought we'd be…and probably also farther from some sort of satisfying victory over the Forces of Evil.
I mean, a few days after 9/11, when it became clear that this Bin Laden guy was the baddie, did you think we'd be sitting here, almost two months later, hearing the Secretary of Defense saying, in effect, "Well, maybe we won't catch him"? I sure didn't.
Things seem amazingly normal to me. We've had the World Series, we've had the Emmy Awards, the Republicans are finding ways to shovel more of the treasury at wealthy Americans (especially those in the oil/energy business who gave money to the G.O.P.) and the Democrats are doing little more than saying, "Shame, shame."