September 11th

My second day of law school. Never to be forgotten.

Via instapundit, here's an excellent commemorative slideshow. I am in full agreement with an old post of McNair's that anti-American diatribes make me sick, and the smugness with which too many view our neighbours is damn frustrating.

The type of relativism evident in Heather Mallick's Globe column yesterday is still all too evident. Criticize the current administration, fine. But do you really need to compare Bush to Chairman Mao and Joseph Stalin to make a point?

Remember the American Century? It was a lot like the Great Leap Forward. For there was another man once who thought about his own populace the way Mr. Bush does about his. He, too, had his privileged court of acolytes, fine homes and a yearning for superpowerdom that allowed him to send food aid around the
Communist world, as his people starved. He, too, had a vast voiceless population
living in astonishing poverty even as other world leaders (like Richard Nixon) paid him homage. His name was Mao Zedong.

Just as Barbara Bush casually points out that underprivileged flood victims are actually better off now, Mao dismissed the suffering of the peasantry as they starved to build his shoddy steelworks and collapsing pointless dams. (Odd how China and the United States are both crazy for dams.) Mao cared no more for his peasant dam-builders than Stalin did for the welfare of his own troops and citizenry.

Simply unbelievable.