"But some are more equal than others"

If this headline, Was 9/11 really that bad?, doesn't make you think of Orwell's Animal Farm, you haven't read it. It culminated a decade of acts of war which escalated because we didn't take them seriously. Try to imagine what kind of attack on our country could be worse, and it's probably in the works.

The author:

David A. Bell, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and a contributing editor for the New Republic, is the author of "The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It."

His argument is that 9/11 could have been a lot worse. Well, yeah, but the Second World War could have been a lot less devastating if the rest of Europe had stood up to Hitler earlier on and nipped Nazism in the bud. Nobody knows how many innocents have been murdered and starved to death in the Soviet Union, Red China, North Korea and Vietnam because we were tired of war. It's unlikely that we even know how many are being similarly brutalized in nations below our radar, like Sudan, the Congo, etc., because the U.N. has become the chief obstacle to relieving their suffering instead of the chief means of relief as it was intended.

This piece is another one of those "it needs to be said" essays (seemingly following the success of the "shock jock" phenomenon) that are so popular today. They come most often, but not always, from liberals who are writing them just for the frisson of being impolite, nay rude and outrageous. They're trolling for attention and denounced on conservative talk radio and Fox News Channel, but the tactic is getting old, and, I hope, being seen for the puerile nonsense it is. To be respected on the left these days you have to be angry, foul-mouthed and childish. But I thought that when Jonathan Chait uncorked the storm of abuse with his The Case for Bush Hatred: Mad About You in The New Republic, making it OK for pseudo intellectuals of the left to behave like two-year-olds. If this is populism, Senator Webb is welcome to it.