In my Bible reading this morning, I stumbled across both these readings, which seemed to speak to today:

The desire of the afflicted you hear, O Lord;
strengthening their hearts, you pay heed
To the defense of the fatherless and the oppressed,
that man, who is of earth, may terrify no more.

And:

Be not afraid of sudden terror, of the ruin of the wicked [i.e., ruin caused by the wicked] when it comes;
For the Lord will be your confidence, and will keep your foot from the snare.

Hmmmmmm.

Mark Steyn.

Best of the Web:

The U.N. may stumble into serving some useful humanitarian functions, but on the whole it is an incompetent, corrupt organization whose moral bearings are unreliable at best. This is the outfit whose permission some American politicians demand we seek before defending our country.
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Somewhat surreally, the bombing, on the semianniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, comes as one of the major American political parties has just nominated a presidential candidate who believes terrorism is principally a law-enforcement matter rather than a war. Reader Andrew Fox pithily puts things in perspective:

Maybe we can send Spain some state troopers or something to help them clean up the mess. Maybe a team of FBI agents to plot trajectories, determine chemical compositions and give the Spanish national police force lessons on how not to profile ethnically.

Or we could tell them that the 101st Airborne Division will remember their families, too, when the time comes to deliver justice.

Maybe the War on terror isn't so dumb after all.

Oh, OK, then.

Jeff Jarvis:

Donald Rumsfeld is getting crap for having a piece of the debris from the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon in his office.

Well, I say he should keep it there. And he should give it to his successor, who should never forget whom we're fighting and what we're protecting. And I'll go farther:

Take a piece of debris from the Towers and put it in the lobby of the FBI under a sign that says, "Remember."

Michele at A Small Victory:

We got to talking about the great divide between the left* and the right and I repeated to him a point I made some time last year: The left no longer have causes. They have anti-causes.

Being anti-everything makes for bitterness and anger, and it is increasingly evident that all of those negative vibes the left has been surrounding themselves with have gotten in the way of clear thinking and reason.
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You can practically hear the liquid hate sloshing around in their bellies as they walk past you.

They don't care about the world anymore. They only care about their one, single agenda: hating and ridding the world of George W. Bush. These people aren't really for John Kerry. They wouldn't care if he were Atilla the Hun or Jeffrey Dahmer; they crusade for him simply because he's not George Bush.

They secretly - and some not so secretly - rub their hands in glee every time a soldier is killed in Iraq or a bomb goes off somewhere and al Qaida is blamed. Another notch in their anti-George belt. They gloat about death, smirking over dead bodies and chanting their catch phrase of "I told you so."
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On a day when 200 people lay dead, stuffed into black body bags, waiting to be identified by relatives, a group of people stood outside an event where the president was and demanded we pull out of Iraq. They demanded that we understand Islam better. They demanded that we abolish Homeland Security and stop funding the war on terror.

They have no causes. They just have an agenda of subtraction. And every single thing they go on chanting about is based in selfishness. That and their hatred for Bush. Such a deep, vile hatred that they will do anything - even crusade for a man they don't find dignified in any way - just to rid the White House of their perceived enemy.
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I wonder if we have a future. What is going to be left of us if an appeaser is voted into the White House just because he wasn't George Bush?

I hope I never find out.