After September 11, no foreigner can fully understand what it is like to live in America.  Every day, we have to listen to our leaders telling us why the Constitution doesn’t work any more.  It is enough to make an honest conservative want to join the ACLU—almost.  The ACLU will go all the way to protect terrorist groups from ethnic profiling, but it is strangely silent on the persecution of pro-life activists.  The media have been dropping hints lately that the real culprits in the anthrax scare are probably straight, white, pro-life, right-wing males, and Republicans, who would scarcely have a party—much less control of the White House—without the support of the pro-life movement, are too demoralized to protect the civil liberties of anyone to the right of Denny Hastert.

Every time there is a national crisis caused by leftists and their principles, it is always used to crack down on the right and advance leftist principles.  If, say, a communist shoots a president, we are treated to lengthy exposés of the right-wing conspiracy, followed by movie spoofs pretending that JFK was killed because of his principles (the humane and peace-loving Jack was just about to pull the plug on Vietnam!).  Or, if there is an epidemic of illegitimacy among teenaged girls or a social disease like AIDS, it can never lead to a reevaluation of the amoral hedonism promoted by public schools, the media, and Planned Parenthood; no, it is the pretext for more sex education and more frank discussion of obscene acts on the evening news.

In this context, September 11 means that, now more than ever, some Republican congressmen are saying we need the President’s missile-defense bailout of the munitions industry.  But it is also time, say the Democrats, to crack down on the Christian gun-owners who hijack planes and fly them into public buildings, and we have to impose stringent restrictions on all Americans everywhere, and never, never suggest that Muslims per se might constitute a security threat.  And finally, to ensure the safety of the flying public, we must continue to apply draconian rules on affirmative-action and minority rights, whether security is handled by private firms or by a government agency with even stricter affirmative-action guidelines.  When Argenbright Security (infamous for letting the Nepalese illegal immigrant with seven knives and a stun gun through an O’Hare checkpoint) fired seven Muslim women a few years ago—four from the Sudan, a terrorist state according to our government—the EEOC made the firm rehire the women.  According to Paul Sperry of WorldNetDaily, the EEOC complaint was “drafted by a lawyer for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based interest group that has spoken out in support of terrorist groups.”

I had thought that the American press had sunk to an all-time low of vulgarity and servility in the Clinton years—the years of Monica and Kosovo—but I was wrong.  They don’t even like George W. Bush, yet they are more subservient to his administration than they ever were to Clinton’s.  I avoid the newspapers, but just when I was beginning to think it was safe to come out of hiding, I received faxes from “conservative” media pundits complaining about the disloyalty of the American press, and after five minutes of The O’Reilly Factor, I switch—for a reality check—to old movies like The Manchurian Candidate or Invasion of the Body Snatchers.