Was That Headline Really That Bad? Apparently, Yes
Patterico
David Bell’s “terrorism? schmerrorism” piece from Sunday was originally titled “Was 9/11 really that bad?” — at least on the Web. A Google search for that title reveals numerous hits, the first of which is a link to the piece itself. And here is a reproduction of the piece with that title.
But that provocative title has been replaced with the more innocuous headline Putting 9/11 into perspective. ...
9/11... Not Your Grandfather's Kind of Apocalypse!
Hatched by Dafydd
More and more, Big Lizards seems to be zeroing in on the insanity of the big-box media. I don't mind; it's a topic that is critical, amusing -- and endlessly giving.
I am undeterred by the fact that a couple of bloggers I regularly read, Real Clear Politics and Patterico's Pontifications, have already posted on the infamous L.A. Times opinion piece that argues 9/11 wasn't so bad after all. As always, we have our own take... and we shall actually argue the case why global jihadism is indeed an "existential threat" to the United States; and how, if anything, we have underreacted -- not overreacted -- to that threat. Read on...
All the news sources cite some subset of the same three paragraphs from the Op-Ed piece by David Bell in the Los Angeles Times:
Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?
Certainly, if we look at nothing but our enemies' objectives, it is hard to see any indication of an overreaction. The people who attacked us in 2001 are indeed hate-filled fanatics who would like nothing better than to destroy this country. But desire is not the same thing as capacity, and although Islamist extremists can certainly do huge amounts of harm around the world, it is quite different to suggest that they can threaten the existence of the United States.
Yet a great many Americans, particularly on the right, have failed to make this distinction. For them, the "Islamo-fascist" enemy has inherited not just Adolf Hitler's implacable hatreds but his capacity to destroy. The conservative author Norman Podhoretz has gone so far as to say that we are fighting World War IV (No. III being the Cold War).
Leaving aside for a moment that Podhoretz is not the first -- nor even the 1,001st -- to use the phrase "World War IV" (has David Bell really never seen that nomenclature before?), the fact remains that Bell never actually defines his terms. What does it mean to say something "threatens the existence" of the United States? Without such a definition, logical argument becomes mere pot and pan banging.
In place of analysis, Bell uses a classic technique of demagoguery; the first time he introduces his thesis, he phrases it as a question: ...
