Amnesia, updated

Just a few days ago I was quoting

Moore is the most powerful spokesman of the myth that gripped the Spanish people when they elected Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero as their Prime Minister in the wake of the Madrid bombing: namely, that if we oust specific politicians from office – replace Bush with Kerry, Blair with Brown – the Islamic fundamentalists will leave us alone . . .

and repeated that we are at war. This is what has to be foremost in our minds in the upcoming election. Every other issue is secondary.

The Democratic Party has embarked on a campaign based on image, carefully presenting two candidates who don’t have time for security briefings but have good hair and can party at Radio City Music Hall with potty-mouth entertainers that xerox their bottoms as RSVPs to the event (the video of said event won’t be released, either).

Now along comes Hans Blix, warning “that one should be wary of the claim that “the risk that reckless groups and governments might acquire weapons of mass destruction is the greatest problem facing our world today.” Why? Because “to hundreds of millions of people around the world, the big existential issue is hunger, and also that wherever you live on this planet, the risk of global warming and other environmental threats are existential.”

Thank G-d for people like Krauthammer, who reminds us,

There is no gradualness and there are no countermeasures to a dozen nuclear warheads detonating simultaneously in U.S. cities. Think of what just two envelopes of anthrax did to paralyze the capital of the world’s greatest superpower. A serious, coordinated attack on the United States using weapons of mass destruction could so shatter America as a functioning, advanced society that it would take generations to rebuild.

What is so dismaying is that such an obvious truth needs repeating. The passage of time, the propaganda of the anti-American left and the setbacks in Iraq have changed nothing of that truth. This is the first time in history that the knowledge of how to make society-destroying weapons has been democratized. Today small radical groups allied with small radical states can do the kind of damage to the world that in the past only a great, strategically located and industrialized power such as Germany or Japan could do.

It is a new world and exceedingly dangerous. Everything is at stake. We are now deeply engaged in a breast-beating exercise for not having connected the dots before Sept. 11. And yet here we are three years after Sept. 11, with the dots already connected, and we are under a powerful urge to ignore them completely.

Ignorance is bliss? Blixful, maybe. Blissful, never.

Update PoliPundit posts on American Mythology 2004, also available at The Fourth Rail, on liberal myths about Iraq.