With as much coverage as there has been in the blogosphere about the disrupted plot to blow up as many as 20 planes and commit mass murder on an unprecedented scale, bigger than 9/11, there isn't much for me to add.

But I'm still wondering about the emotional need people have to make terrorism go away -- what I likened yesterday to using the vote as a remote.

Terrorism is not television, and it can't be turned off. The channels can't be changed. Will politicians who promise a nostaligic return to the good old days of ignoring or appeasing terrorism and treating it as a police problem be successful?

Denial is very powerful, and I can't agree more with what Glenn Reynolds said in his earlier roundup:

Some people have decided that the war on terror is passe.

Bush will of course go away, because he is not headed for reelection. But what then? Terrorism isn't going anywhere.

The channel can't be changed.

The past may have seemed better, and I know that people are tired of the war against terrorism. Frankly, I am sick to death of writing about it in this blog, and I suspect many readers are equally sick of reading about it in yet another blog post.

But being sick of something because it will not go away will not make it go away. Nor will pretending it isn't there, wishing it out of existence, blaming it on elected leaders who are trying to respond to it, or imagining that returning to a more peaceful past is possible.

Imagining a return to a more peaceful past when we live in a very un-peaceful present is like watching reruns of old war protests in the face of a real war.

Besides, there are two sides in this war: the terrorist side and the rest of us. The terrorist side targets the rest of us for doing things no more warlike than lining up at airports to get on planes. That goes to the nature of terrorism: the evil targeting of innocent people.

If there's anything to protest, it strikes me that it would be terrorism. Not the people trying to stop the terrorists. It is one thing to criticize the Iraq War, but those who defend the terrorists and who actually call people like Bush and Blair "terrorists" seem to be missing a crucial distinction. Not only are they not going to make terrorism go away, I don't think the people who rely on their support (and whose ranks are filled with them) are going to make terrorism go away.

This is not to say that the antiwar left consists entirely of people who defend terrorism and think Bush and Blair are terrorists. And of course, there is also an antiwar right, which believes isolationism (another old rerun) will solve the problem.

Being "against war" right now is not the same as wishing the war on terrorism away. But both are good ways to lose.

Lose the war, that is.

Unfortunately, being against war seems to be a good way to win elections. At least it was a couple of days ago. I'm wondering whether this warning from Joseph Lieberman might have been intended for the long term:

Mr Lieberman has warned voters that a slide to the anti-war left plays into the hands of the Republicans who are keen to split the party.

"They are anxious to say the left wing is taking over, the anti-security wing," Mr Lieberman said last night.

But I don't doubt that they'd love to change the channel.

UPDATE: Here's the anti-Iraq-War Jacob Weisberg, writing in Slate:

...you can hardly read too much into Ned Lamont's defeat of Joe Lieberman in Connecticut's Aug. 8 primary. This is a signal event that will have a huge and lasting negative impact on the Democratic Party. The result suggests that instead of capitalizing on the massive failures of the Bush administration, Democrats are poised to re-enact a version of the Vietnam-era drama that helped them lose five out six presidential elections between 1968 and the end of the Cold War.

The problem for the Democrats is that the anti-Lieberman insurgents go far beyond simply opposing Bush's faulty rationale for the war, his dishonest argumentation for it, and his incompetent execution of it. Many of them appear not to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously. They see Iraq purely as a symptom of a cynical and politicized right-wing response to Sept. 11, as opposed to a tragic misstep in a bigger conflict. Substantively, this view indicates a fundamental misapprehension of the problem of terrorism. Politically, it points the way to perpetual Democratic defeat.

I knew that the next election would be the Democrats' to lose, as I see the Republican Party as moribund and in disarray, with the unpopularity of the president and the war at all time highs.

But really. Who could have imagined that the Democrats could be dumb enough to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?

Is there still time for them to stop listening to the antiwar left?

We'll see.