An unusually interesting 9/11 anniversary

Tenth anniversaries are like that, I guess. This is the first anniversary of 9/11 since the death of Bin Laden. We seem to have come full-circle. We awoke on the original 9/11 to discover that an entire country--Afghanistan--was hosting terrorists who were targeting the US. And finally Pakistan, as we recently and rather unexpectedly learned, had been hosting and protecting Bin Laden for years, right up until his demise. You have to give Obama credit for one gloriously non-politically-correct act: he dumped Bin Laden's body into the sea. Can you imagine the news headlines now on the first anniversary of 9/11 since Bin Laden's death if there was an actual grave-site and people visiting it? The Muslims Against Crusades will just have to settle for the US embassy in London.

Nevertheless, political correctness marches on. Mark Steyn has an entertaining piece at the National Review about 9/11 memorial events that play up diversity and tolerance and which don't bother with unpleasant images of firemen and airplanes flying into buildings. Zandar of Zandar vs. the Stupid is overcome with revulsion:

In Mark Steyn's America, you're supposed to live in mortal fear of anyone who's not a white, evangelical Christian because they'll kill you, your family, your pets, your neighbors, the nice lady at the office who brings donuts every other Friday and then they'll raise from the dead with their weird religious magic and kill you all over again.

Don't worry, Zandar, according to Paul Krugman, "even people on the right know" that "What happened after 9/11 . . . was deeply shameful." Jeffrey Goldberg, however, isn't ashamed:

Self-criticism is necessary, even indispensable, for democracy to work. But this decade-long drama began with the unprovoked murder of 3,000 people, simply because they were American, or happened to be located in proximity to Americans. It is important to get our categories straight: The profound moral failures of the age of 9/11 belong to the murderers of al Qaeda, and those (especially in certain corners of the Muslim clerisy, along with a handful of bien-pensant Western intellectuals) who abet them, and excuse their actions. [...]

The next sentence about ruins it, but maybe the message of this 9/11 anniversary is to take whatever sensible remembrance you can get. (h/t: memeorandum)