Barbara Olson kept her cool. In the hysteria and terror of hijackers herding passengers to the rear of the plane, she retrieved her cell phone and called her husband, Ted, the solicitor general of the United States. She informed him that he had better call the FBI — the plane had been hijacked. According to reports, Barbara was still on the phone with Ted when her plane plunged in a fiery explosion directly into the Pentagon.

Barbara risked having her neck slit to warn the country of a terrorist attack. She was a patriot to the very end.

This is not to engage in the media's typical hallucinatory overstatement about anyone who is the victim of a horrible tragedy. The furtive cell phone call was an act of incredible daring and panache. If it were not, we'd be hearing reports of a hundred more cell phone calls. (Even people who swear to hate cell phones carry them for commercial air travel.)

The last time I saw Barbara in person was about three weeks ago. She generously praised one of my recent columns and told me I had really found my niche. Ted, she said, had taken to reading my columns aloud to her over breakfast.

I mention that to say three things about Barbara. First, she was really nice. A lot of people on TV seem nice, but aren't. (And some who don't seem nice, are.) But Barbara was always her charming, graceful, vebullient self. "Nice" is an amazingly rare quality among writers. In the opinion business, bitter, jealous hatred is the norm. Barbara had reason to be secure.

Second, it was actually easy to imagine Ted reading political columns aloud to Barbara at the breakfast table. Theirs was a relationship that could only be cheaply imitated by Bill and Hillary — the latter being a subject of Barbara's appropriately biting bestseller, Hell to Pay. Hillary claimed preposterously in the Talk magazine interview that she discussed policy with Bill while cutting his grapefruit in the morning. Ted and Barbara really did talk politics — and really did have breakfast together.

It's "Ted and Barbara" just like it's Fred and Ginger, and George and Gracie. They were so perfect together, so obvious, that their friends were as happy they were on their wedding day. This is more than the death of a great person and patriotic American. It's a human amputation.

Third, since Barbara's compliment, I've been writing my columns for Ted and Barbara. I'm always writing to someone in my head. Now I don't know who to write to. Ted-and-Barbara were a good muse.

Apart from hearing that this beautiful light has been extinguished from the world, only one other news flash broke beyond the numbingly omnipresent horror of the entire day. That evening, CNN reported that bombs were dropping in Afghanistan — and then updated the report to say they weren't our bombs.

They should have been ours. I want them to be ours.

This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack. Those responsible include anyone anywhere in the world who smiled in response to the annihilation of patriots like Barbara Olson.

We don't need long investigations of the forensic evidence to determine with scientific accuracy the person or persons who ordered this specific attack. We don't need an "international coalition." We don't need a study on "terrorism." We certainly didn't need a congressional resolution condemning the attack this week.

The nation has been invaded by a fanatical, murderous cult. And we welcome them. We are so good and so pure we would never engage in discriminatory racial or "religious" profiling.

People who want our country destroyed live here, work for our airlines, and are submitted to the exact same airport shakedown as a lumberman from Idaho. This would be like having the Wehrmacht immigrate to America and work for our airlines during World War II. Except the Wehrmacht was not so bloodthirsty.

"All of our lives" don't need to change, as they keep prattling on TV. Every single time there is a terrorist attack — or a plane crashes because of pilot error — Americans allow their rights to be contracted for no purpose whatsoever.

The airport kabuki theater of magnetometers, asinine questions about whether passengers "packed their own bags," and the hostile, lumpen mesomorphs ripping open our luggage somehow allowed over a dozen armed hijackers to board four American planes almost simultaneously on Bloody Tuesday. (Did those fabulous security procedures stop a single hijacker anyplace in America that day?)

Airports scrupulously apply the same laughably ineffective airport harassment to Suzy Chapstick as to Muslim hijackers. It is preposterous to assume every passenger is a potential crazed homicidal maniac. We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

© 2001 Universal Press Syndicate

I agree with her 100%.

America needs to kill more civillians to win this war.

So what if some innocent people die, I mean, Bin Laden didnt care, so why should we?

Long live the 4th reich!!!!

Everytime the cheap labor conservatives open their mouths and put a foot in it they always say,"AAhh come one I didn't really mean exactly that. Just exaggerating for effect. Just kidding." Such bullshit. Annie Coulter is a vituperative and strident voice of the cheap labor right that shows exactly what their true colors are like. Human beings are just canon fodder for what ever maniacal whims this government can think up. Just another cheap labor conservative chickenhawk.

You had promised to capitalize the words when you wrote them.

"Cheap Labor Conservatives"

Now, stick with the program.

Got to draw a damn picture to get you wackos to do anything correct.

What we should do is give her a gun, and send her on the next flight to Iraq. If she feels the need to have the war then let her fight along with the rest of the pro-war people. I'm not talking about offering up her son or daughter either; I'm talking about her!

I heard a few minutes of an interviews with this author, and she was so impatient with the host, where she would say, get to my book, get to my book! She talks like she is an authority on the McCarthy era when she was not even alive. If you talk to people who were alive, they will discredit much of her opinions. I am opposed to communism, but also fascism, and if she can not see this happening, then I think she could take her law degree and stuff it. How can this freedom of speech author support the loss of our liberties, next thing you know it could be her going to Camp Delta.

Ride away, ride away

In the early dawn

We are no longer a fawn

But a pawn who gets a yawn

For the order, out of need

Or could it just be greed

If we deliver the seed

Or help with the tricks

Then we may get our fix

Wine cigarettes and caviar

And maybe even a sports car

Or perhaps a conniving brute

Who cannot compute, or hold the loot

Who all should get the boot

A kick to the moon, maybe real soon

Redemption draw nigh

With a pleasing sigh

Without a single spy

Last month The Nation's David Corn criticized writers for having identified the Angry Left, which I personally describe as a small but vocal segment of the electorate that has spent the past few years nursing a series of grievances--impeachment, Florida, Iraq--and building up a red-hot rage. Corn dubbed people who refer to this discussion of the Angry Left as engaging in "anger-baiting":

"The moniker is designed as a put-down, one meant to signal that those afflicted with anti-Bushism are motivated by emotion, not rationality, that they cannot be reasoned with, that they and their ideas need not be taken seriously."

Actually, I mean it as a description, and it still strikes me as an accurate one. Unfortunately for Corn, the day after he published the piece on "anger-baiting," The New Republic published a candid piece by senior editor Jonathan Chait that began as follows:

"I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. . . . I hate the inequitable way he has come to his economic and political achievements and his utter lack of humility (disguised behind transparently false modesty) at having done so. . . . I hate the way he walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks--blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing--a way to establish one's social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more."

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030929&s=chait092903

That's just from the first paragraph! Chait continues: "There seem to be quite a few of us Bush haters. I have friends who have a viscerally hostile reaction to the sound of his voice or describe his existence as a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche." (Although TNR published this article two weeks ago, only this week did it become available to nonsubscribers on the Web.)

Both Chait and Corn try to argue that there's a rational basis for Bush hatred. According to Chait, Bush is "a truly radical president." On foreign policy, Chait is actually somewhat sympathetic with the president (he says he backed the liberation of Iraq). On domestic policy, though, Chait lapses into paulkrugmania: "It's not much of an exaggeration to say that Bush would like to roll back the federal government to something resembling its pre-New Deal state." But it is much of an exaggeration.

Corn, for his part, urges liberals to show a little self-control: "If [Bush's] most fervent opponents can be cast as overly choleric, then their arguments need not be considered. Bush foes should expect the anger-baiting to continue, and they should hope that Bush critics counter it with the right mix of calm indignation and well-founded accusations."

Well, Corn has a new book coming out, bearing the calmly indignant title "The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception," and The Nation has an excerpt:

"George W. Bush is a liar. . . . Lying has been one of the essential tools of his presidency. To call the forty-third President of the United States a prevaricator is not an exercise of opinion, not an inflammatory talk-radio device. Rather, it is backed up by an all-too-extensive record of self-serving falsifications. While politicians are often derided as liars, this charge should be particularly stinging for Bush. During the campaign of 2000, he pitched himself as a candidate who could "restore" honor and integrity to an Oval Office stained by the misdeeds and falsehoods of his predecessor. To brand Bush a liar is to negate what he and his supporters declared was his most basic and most important qualification for the job."

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031013&s=corn

This is calm only by contrast with Chait. And the idea that Bush is a liar must seem counterintuitive to ordinary, nonpartisan Americans. After all, he is a pol who generally does what he says he's going to do: He said he'd cut taxes, and he did; he said he'd liberate Afghanistan and Iraq, and they're liberated. On the really important matters, Bush has to be reckoned one of today's more honest politicians.

Chait identifies another source of liberal Bush-hatred: conservatives' admiration for Bush:

"The persistence of an absurdly heroic view of Bush is what makes his dullness so maddening. To be a liberal today is to feel as though you've been transported into some alternative universe in which a transparently mediocre man is revered as a moral and strategic giant. You ask yourself why Bush is considered a great, or even a likeable, man. You wonder what it is you have been missing. Being a liberal, you probably subject yourself to frequent periods of self-doubt. But then you conclude that you're actually not missing anything at all. You decide Bush is a dullard lacking any moral constraints in his pursuit of partisan gain, loyal to no principle save the comfort of the very rich, unburdened by any thoughtful consideration of the national interest, and a man who, on those occasions when he actually does make a correct decision, does so almost by accident."

Reading this, however, only reinforces one's admiration for President Bush. If he drives his opponents so crazy, his supporters reason, he must be doing something right. In this respect, the parallel with Bill Clinton is striking. Clinton's opponents could not understand the man's appeal and frequently worked themselves into a fury over it. The enmity Clinton aroused only bolstered pro-Clinton partisans in their admiration for him.

One difference, though, is that whereas the Democrats lost Congress two years into Clinton's first term, the Republicans gained ground two years into Bush's. That is, Clinton's political success came either at the expense of his own party or despite its decline. It may be, as Bob Bartley argues, that Bush-hatred amounts to simply "the rantings of an establishment in the process of being displaced"--that the impotence of the Angry Left's impotent rage is more significant than the rage.

"What's more," Bartley writes, "this challenge is brought to them by a born-again MBA from Midland, Texas. This is a further challenge to their image of the best people, secular Ivy-league intellectuals. And to twist the knife, President Bush actually comes from an aristocratic family and went to prep school, Yale and Harvard. He has rejected these values for those of Texas." The Bush-haters "sound like nothing so much as the onetime ire of staid Republicans at Franklin D. Roosevelt as 'a traitor to his class.' "

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/rbartley/?id=110004044

Chait seems to agree:

"Conservatives believe liberals resent Bush in part because he is a rough-hewn Texan. In fact, they hate him because they believe he is not a rough-hewn Texan but rather a pampered frat boy masquerading as one, with his pickup truck and blue jeans serving as the perfect props to disguise his plutocratic nature. . . .

During the 1990s, it was occasionally noted that conservatives despised Clinton because he flouted their basic values. . . . In a way, Bush's personal life is just as deep an affront to the values of the liberal meritocracy. How can they teach their children that they must get straight A's if the president slid through with C's--and brags about it!--and then, rather than truly earning his living, amasses a fortune through crony capitalism? . . . Every aspect of Bush's personal history points to the ways in which American life continues to fall short of the meritocratic ideal."

It calls to mind Bob Dole, campaigning for the presidency in 1996, asking vainly, "Where's the outrage?" The outrage was there, of course--but it was only enough to get Dole a bit over 40% of the vote.

The clue to her fakery is when she stated we should conquer the Middle East, and convert them to Christianity. Its such an absurd statement it makes her appears to be a dupe. She is obviously part of the plan to get us all stirred to help finish up the NWO. They say she's only 99 pounds so she needs pity, and some of that good old American food. That's another clue!! Jest kiddin! (Luke 21:12)

quoting those extreme right wing publications in the same breath as when he knocks leftist journals.

What a creepo to actually defend some moron who thinks it is no big deal to wage war on civillians and convert them to Christianity....

Sounds like a christian Bin Laden...

Is this really what america needs?

Go on now Bush

and tell us how it was taken out of context

or she didnt really mean what she said

or

equivicate it somehow to defend this piece of

shit christian extremist

Either way......what she said was wrong

and you know it.

Re-read what Ffutal said. Not once did he critize Bush. He quoted Corn & Chait who say they hate GWB, and you might have mistaken that for Ffutal saying it. But he's correctly pointing out that it's more than just policy disagreements with the anti-Bush crowd, they hate Bush personally. This is the same group who preaches love and tolerance, yet they are some of the more hateful, spiteful and intolerant people that have ever lived.

>That might cure your problem of misinterpreting everything.

Ffutal by all evidence is very well read. He quotes from any number of newspapers, newswires and websites. "Misinterpreting everything" is a bit over the top if you've consistently read his postings. He's the only one here, the ONLY ONE, who rountinely documents everything he quotes. Ane he is without a doubt a conservative. So, your comments are unwarranted.

Ffutal, I appreciate your postings. You come here, you state your opinion on a subject, and you move on. With so many people getting caught up in pissing contests on this board, I find your method refreshing.

I love the term "Angry Left." It so accurately describes the modern day liberals. I'm going to start using it more. The Angry Left is motivated by emotion, not rationality, they cannot be reasoned with, and neither they nor their ideas should be taken seriously.

George(the Little Boy Emperor) Bush is a man of integrity(like selling his Harken stock using insider info before the general public knew what was happening), character(like bailing out of his Texas Air National Guard enlistment for a year and a half) and honesty(how many different spins has he given the occupation of Irag,let me count the ways) is the funniest thing I have read on these pages in weeks. LOL!!!!

P.S. I'm not even bringing up the coke sniffing. Whoops ......or the lack of concern about the nation's safety prior to 9-11 even though all the evidence for a terrorist strike was there....

She's so awful. I can feel my brain leaking out.

>She's so awful. I can feel my brain leaking out.

Leftists don't have brains. What you're experiencing is the discomfort of your overflowing colostomy bag.

Annie Coulter is just another ideologue who doesn't debate, she repeats the same old same old. We just saw it with Rash Lowbrow,when the heat is on and they are not surrounded by sycophants they fall apart and pout("I'm resigning" instead of staying on ESPN and showing some balls).That is the thing about the cheap labor right, if you were to take their views and put them in the 18th century or even the 17th century they would sound the same,"Give it up to the rich and well connected cause they are special, poor people suck because they are not as good as the rich and well connected, the nation/state is the only thing that counts,so you better bow down to it, and be an individual unless we don't like you then you are traitorous scum." Just old, very old. Yawwwwn.

You promised to capitalize it.

"Cheap Labor Right"

Gotta draw a damn picture for you dumbasses for everything.

dumbass coulter is a female bin laden

christian extremist.

If she lived in Germany at the time

we all know what she would have thought......

Ah, the obligatory "Hitler" reference.

Thanks for not letting the team down!

I was thinking somthing different......

Why did you bring up Hitler?

Freudian slip?

rofl

Let's see here:

--Disagrees with Coulter.

--"If she lived in Germany at the time

we all know what she would have thought......"

Yup.

Sounds like a Hitler reference to me.

Now you're trying to hide the fact? Don't bother. It's a waste of time, and will convince no one.

Little Orphan Coulter a master of hyperbole and invective,something the cheap labor conservatives take great delight in. In terms of accuracy she is extremely lacking. Check out the www.spinsanity.org website,where they give all her books a thorough trashing. If this is your idea of high standards,once again the cheap labor conservatives take the gold medal for hypocrisy in action.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

9/11 was an act of war. We are now ar with with terrorists and the states which support terrorism. Thankfully we now have the technology to achieve military targets with very low numbers of innocent civilians getting killed.

The hyperbole is delicious if you savor and laugh at right wingnut rhetoric. When anyone left of Atilla the Hun uses the Hitler reference we get shouted down by the cheap labor conservatives. HOWEVER when they use it to compare Saddam Hussein to Hitler and Iraq to Nazi Germany we are just supposed to say,"Duh O.K. it must be right." Well it is right....right wingnut cheap labor conservative. This puny country that we bombed regularly for TEN YEARS before we invaded, was basically stripped of most weapons by UN inspectors, that couldn't even put up some kind of defense is being compared by right wing wackos to the immense war machine of Nazi Germany is so fucking laughable. Hey all cheap labor right wing wacko's .....check your HYPERBOLE JACKETS at the front door when entering IMC.

Tell you what krank, if the boy across the street wants to mow your lawn for and you want to pay him , that's your business. Just don't demand the rest of the neighborhood pay him just because you do.

The only thing your "living wage" proposal would do is put a bunch of unskilled labor out of work. No one's gonna pay someone for a job that's only worth .

ahh americans...

entertain me with your stories about how your country has never done any wrong

Hey mow your own lawn. Your "concern" for unskilled labor is laughable. Or is that part of your cheap labor conservative trickle down "theory" or should I say fantasy.

Unskilled labor would suffer if you paid a living wage. A job is worth a certain amount of compensation based upon what kind of work it is. You artifically inflate the value of the job, and the product needs to go up in price to offset the higher costs. Everyone raising prices causes inflation. Now you have to pay more money to offset the higher prices. It's an upward spiral.

The other choice is to lay off workers to the bare minimum and automate jobs where people used to be. The only thing your "living wage" proposal would do is put a bunch of unskilled labor out of work. You can't artifically inflate the value of a particular job without effecting the whole market. No business that wants to stay in business is going to pay someone for work that's only worth .

"You artifically inflate the value of the job, and the product needs to go up in price to offset the higher costs. Everyone raising prices causes inflation."

Your statement accurately describes the culture of the self-serving upper management.

"No business that wants to stay in business is going to pay someone for work that's only worth . "

I wholeheartedly agree. When are the board members and their minions going to take a pay cut?

Or abolishing the "golden parachute" practice of failing CEOs? Workers lose their jobs when they don't perform. Why is upper management above this?

It is about time to remind Wall Street that workers are not a commodity.