9/11 and American Exceptionalism - The Second Chapter

Lest anyone think that Ted Koppel's missive last week on the national compulsive over-reaction to 9/11 was just an attempt by a single former media darling to regain current exposure, along comes this missive from Fareed Zakaria:

So the legitimate question now is: Have we gone too far? Is the vast expansion in governmental powers and bureaucracies -- layered on top of the already enormous military-industrial complex of the Cold War -- warranted? Does an organization that has as few as 400 members and waning global appeal require the permanent institutional response we have created?

The obvious answer to me, and to many more Americans I suspect, is yes we've gone too far. The problem is the message it too many days late, and too few dollars short. See, many on the Left did decry the excesses of the Bush years, and many of us warmed to Candidate Obama because we expected him to roll those excesses back. But just as Mr. Koppel talked in generalities about our national mind-state and not in specifics about what our current regime is doing, so too Mr. Zakaria tries to avoid being pushed out o fthe "Liberal media" camp by not calling out Mr. Obama directly.

Cowardace is alive and well on the Left side of the political aisle, and while I fear its repurcussions in the forthcoming election, Democrats and liberals generally have no one to blame but themselves for allowing this state of affairs to persist.