My thanks to Justin for posting while I was away. (A minor administrative blog hassle seems to have temporarily messed up comments, but it's being fixed thanks to Host Matters, and comments will probably work by the time this post goes up.)

As if I needed any reminder while I was away, I see that it's an increasingly ugly world out there.

I certainly hope the Democratic majority is up to the task, as the lame duck president couldn't be any lamer if he tried. (No need to shoot lame ducks, of course, so I suspect they'll lay off the impeachment and "war crimes" tribunals in the near future.)

As to whether the multiculturalist Democrat identity politicians are up to the task, reading Victor Davis Hanson's post on war hardly reassures me:

....[T]he West is encountering something novel, as it fights its first politically-correct war, in which all the postmodern chickens of the 1980s and 1990s have come home to roost. Thus multiculturalism makes it hard to fight non-Europeans from the former third world, inasmuch as it argued there was not just little distinctively good about the West, but rather the once recognized universal sins of mankind--racism, sexism, class oppression, inequality, patriarchy--were to be seen as exclusively Western.

If you have taught youth for generations that the story of World War II is Hiroshima and the Japanese internment, not Normandy, the Bulge, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, then how can you expect a nation to fight an enemy without making a mistake? And if dropping the bomb on Japan to stop its daily murdering of thousands in its collapsing empire, and to avoid something that would have made the horrific Battle for Berlin look like a cakewalk is equated with the Holocaust, how can the United States marshal the moral authority to press ahead, secure that its killing of jihadists is a different sort from jihadists killing the innocent or each other?

Add into this dangerous modernist soup moral equivalence, or what we know as "conflict resolution theory." It postulates that any use of force de facto is equivalent to any other....

All it will take is subjecting a few more ordinary voters to chants of "Allahuakbar" on airplanes, and the enablers of the chanters will lose.

As Hanson implies in his suprisingly optimistic conclusion, the Democratic leaders are smart enough to understand this:

....A progressive can call the ACLU all day long, but after 9/11 if he stands in line at an airport gate listening to an imam chanting Allah Akbar as he and his friends board, our liberal friend will begin to worry. And second, our enemies have no intention of relenting. They smell blood and want our carcass, so eventually even the progressive mind will give up the pieties of peace and face the inevitable....

Of course, this has to be tempered with Ted Koppel's definition of a liberal as a "conservative who just got arrested." (Or who's maybe been a mistaken victim of a SWAT team.)

I guess if you don't like being mugged or arrested, you can always be a libertarian -- but that doesn't mean you won't get both!

The problem with using this analogy is that terrorism is on a much grander scale than mugging (regardless of the politics of the victims), and not too many conservatives (or liberals, for that matter) have been getting arrested as terrorists.