President Bush has been on the trail giving speech after speech after speech after speech. I didn’t watch any of them—not because I’m bored with the subject but because I don’t need to be convinced: even if I deplore his manner and his pugnaciousness and his aggressive righteousness, I agree with him about the war against Islamic fascists.

I didn’t watch any media coverage of 9/11—none. But here’s a summary of Bush’s speech tonight:

Bush said the war on terrorism was only in its “early hours” and described it as a “struggle for civilisation.”

“Our nation has endured trials — and we face a difficult road ahead,” Bush said.

“Winning this war will require the determined efforts of a unified country. So we must put aside our differences, and work together to meet the test that history has given us.”

His argument for staying in Iraq amounted to the same theme he has been using on the campaign trail, that it would be wrong to give in to the temptation to pull out of Iraq before the government in Baghdad is stable, which many American increasingly see as a fleeting prospect.

Democrats see the Iraq war as a distraction from the war on terrorism. Some would like a phased redeployment of US troops from Iraq by year’s end, forcing Bush to make his case to Americans weary of the war that the troops must stay.

“If we yield Iraq to men like bin Laden, our enemies will be emboldened. They will gain a new safe haven, and they will use Iraq’s resources to fuel their extremist movement. We will not allow this to happen.

“America will stay in the fight,” he said.

His argument makes sense, it’s reasonable and easy enough to follow, and he has a can-do attitude. It may stick. Or it may not. I’ll check back.

So says Dr. Muhammad Abdul Bari, chief of the Muslim Council of Britain, who claims Muslims are being “demonized” and he has a warning:

“Some police officers and sections of the media are demonising Muslims, treating them as if they are all terrorists, and that encourages other people to do the same.

“If that demonisation continues, then Britain will have to deal with two million Muslim terrorists, 700,000 of them in London. “If you attack a whole community, it becomes despondent and aggressive,” he added.

The message from Dr Bari appeared to be aimed at muting criticism from police officers and broadcasters and newspapers who have questioned widely-held Muslim attitudes and at police officers who have called for greater surveillance of Muslims.

I have a feeling that attempts to intimidate the British press and the British elite into muting their criticism (aka extreme political correctness aka soft totalitarianism) will fall on deaf ears, if BBC announcer Katty Kay is any indication. Yesterday on the Chris Matthews Show, Kay had some sharp words about homegrown British Muslim extremists:

MATTHEWS: Welcome back. Katty, tell me something I don’t know.

Ms. KAY: President Bush is going around the country telling people that Iraq is now the front line in the war on terrorism. Well, many in Britain would disagree with that. We’re starting to feel that Britain is the front line on the war on terrorism, certainly in Europe. And a recent poll shows that 13 percent of British Muslims think that the people who attacked the Underground in July of last year were martyrs. Thirteen percent. [my emphasis]

Britain seems to be in big trouble—much bigger than anything we’ve seen in the States, because their problem is indigenous and potentially ubiquitous: a frightening prospect.

Although I find reasons to criticize most of it, I’m a pop culture fan—and a fan of anything that gets people to understand our world a little better, regardless of the format—so it will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I’m enthusiastic about this graphic adaptation of The 9/11 Report, which was published a couple of weeks ago to little fanfare but which apparently has been enjoying excellent sales.

The book boasted an initial print run of 60,000 copies, and has gone back for additional printings of 20,000. And like its original source material, which was published two years ago, the adaptation has made the New York Times bestseller list, debuting at No. 6 in the paperback nonfiction category.

Veteran children’s comic book writers Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, who are both in their mid-seventies, are my new heroes. Having spent their 50-year career doing work-for-hire, they made a fascinating discovery (interestingly, one that has not been mentioned anywhere in the hysteria over ABC’s The Path to 9/11) and ran with it:

one of Jacobson’s biggest paydays is coming from a property that he had absolutely no hand in creating. As a work of the U.S. government, the 9/11 report falls in the public domain, a fact discovered by Colón when he read a news story about director Ron Howard’s effort to turn the report into a film. [emphasis added]

(Memo to Bill Clinton, Esq.: The Report is in the public domain, which means anyone has the right to publish it. And toy with it.)

Anyway, the writers took the 567-page report and, in 16 months, condensed it down to 131 comic-book pages:

As expected, the project has its critics:

[S]ome critics of the adaptation argue the medium is an inappropriate venue for such a sensitive topic.

In particular, they’ve taken umbrage with Colón’s use of “Blamm!” in big red letters in a panel showing American Airlines Flight 77 crashing into the Pentagon.

Indeed, I can see that this is not for all tastes:

But Commission co-chairs Hamilton and Kean both endorsed the project after noting that it was serious and faithful to the Report. And Hamilton noted the most important reason for endorsing it: graphic novels reach a different audience—one we especially need to reach.

“It also opens the report up to a whole new audience that doesn’t read much anymore.” [emphasis added]

Oh—and Stan Lee loves it too:

“Never before have I seen a non-fiction book as beautifully and compellingly written and illustrated as The 9/11 Report, A Graphic Adaptation. I cannot recommend it too highly. It will surely set the standard for all future works of contemporary history, graphic or otherwise, and should be required reading in every home, school and library.”

Next up for Colon and Jacobson: a graphic adaptation of the war on terror, based on news reports.

And he’s given us al Qaeda’s third piece in the 9/11-anniversary trilogy.

 ”We have repeatedly warned you and offered a truce with you. Now we have all the legal and rational justification to continue to fight you until your power is destroyed or you give in and surrender,” he said. “The days are pregnant and giving birth to new events.”

 I hope all the lawmakers in America are listening.

John Fund, WSJ:

Docudramas” are the worst draft of history.

No further elaboration needed, right?

When it comes to pop culture: caveat emptor.

This is fucked-up.

CIA counterterrorism officers have signed up in growing numbers for a government-reimbursed, private insurance plan that would pay their civil judgments and legal expenses if they are sued or charged with criminal wrongdoing, according to current and former intelligence officials and others with knowledge of the program.

The new enrollments reflect heightened anxiety at the CIA that officers may be vulnerable to accusations they were involved in abuse, torture, human rights violations and other misconduct, including wrongdoing related to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They worry that they will not have Justice Department representation in court or congressional inquiries, the officials said.

My generation—the baby boomers—is the source of great music, great art, great movies, great scientific and technological innovation, great talent for living the good life, great talent for spreading the wealth, and above all a great need to see social justice reflected in our world.

To that end, we have pushed to make the United States a more perfect union, and have enacted a lot of legislation to put legal muscle behind our fondest hopes for creating that perfect union. We have also been the engine behind creating international institutions that would help spread our well-meaning agenda.

We are also notorious, in our live-and-let-live attitude, for ignoring and refusing to call out and punish unacceptable, criminal, and immoral behavior by certain categories of people: most notoriously, criminals who happen to be very talented or criminals who are underprivileged or criminals who are also people of color (they’re oppressed: don’t kick them when they’re down).

We have also tended to excuse inexcusable behavior in our own children—to pass it off as the fault of the system, or something that is unfairly oppressing them.

And now we are reaping what we sowed: a generation of young progressives that has picked up on a dangerous misapprehension, and is running with it. They claim that the dangers of terrorism were and are overestimated and that the real danger lies in how we in the West respond to it.

Then, as now (I believe), the extent of the direct threat they posed was actually smaller and more fleeting than feared. And then, as now, the really serious and high-stakes danger came from how states responded to the inevitable violent acts that would be successfully carried out from time to time.

To fail to see the organized nature of our terrorist enemies—to ignore that they have a program (jihad) and an excuse (their adherence to reactionary Islam) that immunizes them in the eyes of a live-and-let-live world—is to leave us even more vulnerable now than we were before 9/11, because it means that we don’t even acknowledge, much less understand, our enemies.

This is the detached, inward-looking, self-blaming, not-in-our-name, oh-so-rational “Western opinion” that Tony Blair has been warning us about.

And lest you think I’m unfairly bashing under-30 blogospheric progressives, here’s someone who ought to know better—the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof—defining down the Holocaust, because he doesn’t understand it.

 We have a moral compass within us, and its needle is moved not only by human suffering but also by human evil. That’s what makes genocide special — not just the number of deaths but the government policy behind them. And that in turn is why stopping genocide should be an even higher priority than saving lives from AIDS or malaria.

Even the Holocaust amounted to only 10 percent of World War II casualties and cost far fewer lives than the AIDS epidemic. But the Holocaust evokes special revulsion because it wasn’t just tragic but also monstrous, and that’s why we read Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel. Teenage girls still die all the time, and little boys still starve and lose their parents — but when this arises from genocide, the horror resonates with all humans.

Or it should. But for whatever reason, Sudan’s decision to kill people on the basis of tribe and skin color has aroused mostly yawns around the globe. Now Sudan is raising the stakes by starting a new military offensive in Darfur — and by eliminating witnesses.

The Holocaust is different not because it was “monstrous” or because of its scale or because of its long-suffering Jewish victims.

It was different because the rounding up and killing was researched, planned, systematic, organized, administered, and recorded down to its last detail. It needed—and received—willing executioners from nearly every European country.