Junto Boys

TODAY'S BEST

Tony Blankley on what Katrina should teach us.

As heartbreaking, appalling and disgraceful as this event covering an area the size of Kansas is, it is merely a warning, writ small, of the danger facing the entire country (indeed, our entire Western civilization) if we continue to face the Islamist threat with the same complacency with which we have faced the threat to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

Complacency is easy to spot after the fact. Today, we are all indignant with the complacency of our governments concerning the conditions in New Orleans. And yet, how many of us, honestly, had given a moment's thought to this until sometime last Tuesday morning? Perhaps we assumed our governments were handling such matters? We were wrong.

We Americans are proud of our self-reliance. But today, that self-reliance requires each citizen to think for himself or herself about other dangers, such as the Islamist terrorist threat, and to inquire whether our government is complacent or seized with a sense of urgency to protect America.

I happen to think that regarding the Islamist threat, President Bush has shown more concern and provided more action than most of politicians and journalists. But even the president's actions and thoughts are very dangerously short of what is needed. As much as he has done, it still falls within the category of complacency if one seriously thinks about the threat.

The mortal danger we face comes not merely from Osama bin Laden and a few thousand terrorists. Rather, we are confronted with the Islamic world -- one-fifth of mankind -- in turmoil and insurgent as it has not been in at least 500 (if not 1,500) years. We don't yet know whether this passion has touched 1 percent, 10 percent or 50 percent of over a billion souls. But combined with the sudden and untimely availability of weapons of mass destruction to any sufficiently determined large group of people -- and facilitated by the dangerously interconnected globalized world -- the threat to us all must be as urgently dealt with today, as New Orleans should have been last week and last year and last decade.

I argue that across the board -- from cargo containers searched, to Arab translators hired, to borders guarded, to domestic and foreign intelligence collected, to rational scrutiny of Arab and Muslim young men, to political correctness snubbed, to the size of our military, to our (and Europe's) willingness to defend our culture from Islamist
intimidation, to our international diplomacy -- we remain as complacent and exposed to mortal threat today as were the poor dead souls of New Orleans last week.

But at least we, the still-living, have been given a providential warning.

Bill Murchison on the stupidity of trusting the government to take care of us - or to do much of anything well.

A highly intelligent column by the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger suggests that a basic cause of the mess is over-reliance on bureaucracy, given that bureaucracies tend to personify inefficiency and waste. "This was the primary lesson of the 9/11 Commission Report," Henninger notes.

And Cal Thomas on John Roberts.

With Roberts' nomination to the court already enjoying the announced support of several Democrat Senators, it will be difficult for them to oppose him for chief justice. The question now is: Should President Bush nominate an equally conservative person to the court to fill the remaining vacancy?

He should if he wishes to remain consistent to his often-proclaimed desire to have a court that makes decisions based on the Constitution and not the personal whims, prejudices and objectives of individual judges. No political doctrine has been stated and restated by President Bush as much as this one. To go against it now would be the political equivalent of the president denying his faith.

Bush gets it when it comes to ideology. Unlike his father who listened to top aides and gave the country the liberal disaster named David Souter, whom Senator Edward Kennedy now praises, Bush is not about to see his legacy tainted by someone who is a closet liberal.

Rehnquist could have cared less what the Times thought during his life and the same could be said about the paper's prediction concerning his legacy. He cared about the Constitution and the Court. That is the model President Bush used in finding and selecting John Roberts, and it is the model he should use in his second selection.