Jim Taranto’s “Best of the Web,” which appears almost daily on OpinionJournal.com featured this 1995 quote from former New York Governor Mario Cuomo:

            “The biggest event in my lifetime was the Second World War and we have never been able to recreate it. Some people say thank God, but there's something we lose by not recreating what happened in the Second World War. The Second World War was the last time that this country believed in anything profoundly, any great single cause. What was it? They were evil; we were good. That was Tojo, that was that S.O.B. Hitler, that was Mussolini, that bum. They struck at us in the middle of the night, those sneaks. We are good, they are bad. Let's all get together, we said, and we creamed them. We started from way behind. We found strength in this common commitment, this commonality, community, family, the idea of coming together was best served in my lifetime in the Second World War. You never had a war quite like it.”

            Cuomo, the very blue Democrat, was in fact longing for war as a unifying force in America. On one hand this is crazy. Jim Taranto commented, “He seemed downright nostalgic for a horrific war that killed upward of 50 million people.”

            But on the other hand, Cuomo was correct on several points. World War II was the biggest event of the 20^th century. It clearly delineated a line between good and evil, it solidly unified Americans against a common enemy, not each other, and it created dependable allies with the US in Europe.

            Now if we take some of Cuomo’s words, and massage them to fit the 21^st-century, ascribing them to myself, this is what we come up with:

            “The biggest event in my lifetime was 9/11. 9/11 was the last time that this country believed in anything profoundly, any great single cause. What was it? They were evil; we were good. That was that S.O.B. bin Laden, that bum. They struck at us on that beautiful morning, killing innocent men, women, and children. They were not combatants; they were civilians, whose only ‘crime’ that day was to go to work. We are good, they are bad. Let's all get together, we said, and we are creaming them. We started from way behind. We found strength in this common commitment, this commonality, community, family, the idea of coming together was best served in my lifetime in the War Against Terror. We’ve never had a war quite like it.”

            Imagine if Democrats, Republicans, and all Americans remained united together against the enemy in this 21^st-century war as Americans remained united against Fascism, Nazism and an insane Tojo in Japan throughout the 1940s.

            The enemy we face this century is no less evil. It is bent on world domination, a warped ideology serving as its underpinnings. And what is at stake is just as important now as it was then—the stability of the free world. You cannot live, raise a family, travel and conduct commerce in a world run by terrorists.

            Life is good in America. And it should be. The “pursuit of happiness” is after all, one of our unalienable rights. But we tend to drift into a haze of forgetfulness about the cost of that freedom. WW II snapped us out of our national fog last century. The War Against Terrorism should be able to produce the same effect this century but I fear there are enough politically motivated leaders and their sycophants in the media to effectively drown out much of the sound coming from the warning claxon signaling impending doom.

            On April 28, “United 93” opens in theaters nationwide. If you have seen the trailer, which is itself a subject of controversy, then you have an idea what to expect. I don’t often go to R-rated movies, nor do I generally recommend them, but in this case, the story could not be accurately portrayed without showing the violence that took place on that fateful flight. Before seeing “United 93” consider renting another R-rated movie: “Saving Private Ryan.” The opening scene on the beaches of Normandy, France is bloody and grim. But it underscores the sacrifice Americans were willing to make last century so that you and I could enjoy the freedom we have in America today, a freedom that we are again in peril of losing if we lose our mettle against this enemy this century. n