Antidote to Michael Moore

Norah Vincent has about as clear and succinct an answer to a very troubling worldview as one could wish for:

The war on terror is a ploy. It’s not real. It’s not necessary. It’s just a horror show meant to keep us all cowed and passive while the government has its way. The Bush administration keeps us quaking in our slippers, issuing periodic vague alerts as an elaborate justification for its agenda of plundering the environment, demonizing nonwhite undesirables, quashing our civil liberties and attacking foreign countries with impunity.

This is a view that many people, including certain prominent intellectuals and Hollywood yahoos, appear to share: We live in a culture of fear, for no apparent reason except that Big Brother wants it that way.

This came up recently at a dinner party I attended, where the prevailing view around the table seemed to be that this cartoon worldview as depicted in provocateur Michael Moore’s film “Bowling for Columbine” was right.

….The danger is apocalyptic. What’s more, it’s insidious and ubiquitous. The terrorist diaspora has spread across the world in covert cells from Indonesia, Central Asia, East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula to Lackawanna, N.Y., where authorities arrested six suspected Al Qaeda operatives in September. They are indeed everywhere, around us and among us, striking randomly in New York City, Washington, Bali, Yemen, Kenya, Kuwait and Afghanistan and vowing more to come.

Is this fantasy? Is this paranoia? Hardly. Casualties are mounting on all sides, the enemy is invisible and we are the big fat designated target with nowhere to hide. I’d say we have cause to be very nervous.

This is not the Cold War. It’s far worse. Yet leftists are approaching it in the same spirit of insouciant denial with which they once dismissed the threat of communist spies in our midst.

As access to Soviet archives has shown, they were wrong then. And they’re wrong now. The evidence is in the rubble and the bodies.