Cogent.

Pat Buchanan, whose isolationist politics I don't support, nevertheless has a cogent, well written thing or two to say about the B*** World Order; specifically, about its response to terrorism:

In the worst of terror attacks, we lost 3,000 people. Horrific. But at Antietam Creek, we lost 7,000 in a day’s battle in a nation that was one-ninth as populous. Three thousand men and boys perished every week for 200 weeks of that Civil War. We Americans did not curl up and die. We did not come all this way because we are made of sugar candy.

Germany and Japan suffered 3,000 dead every day in the last two years of World War II, with every city flattened and two blackened by atom bombs. Both came back in a decade. Is al-Qaeda capable of this sort of devastation when they are recruiting such scrub stock as Jose Padilla and the shoe bomber?

In the war we are in, our enemies are weak. That is why they resort to the weapon of the weak—terror. And, as in the Cold War, time is on America’s side. Perseverance and patience are called for, not this panic.

There is something very comforting about conservatives with internally consistent arguments; too many people we call conservative today are simply fascist opportunists, latching onto some conservative arguments in order to gain power.

(Buchanan even quotes Joshua Micah Marshall in this essay. Marshall must be blushing with pride.)