DRONES VS HELLFIRE:

Unmanned Drone (MARK STEYN, September 18, 2006, NY Sun)

A lot of the 9/11 anniversary coverage struck me as distastefully tasteful. On the morning of September 12th, I was pumping gas just off I-91 in Vermont and picked up The Valley News. Its lead headline covered the annual roll call of the dead — or, as the alliterative editor put it, "Litany Of The Lost." That would be a grand entry for Litany Of The Lame, an anthology of all-time worst headlines. 9/11 wasn't a shipwreck: the dead weren't "lost," they were murdered.

So I skipped that story. Underneath was something headlined "Half A Decade Gone By, A Reporter Still Cannot Comprehend Why." Well, in that case maybe you shouldn't be in the reporting business. After half a decade, it's not that hard to "comprehend:" Osama bin Laden issued a declaration of war and then his agents carried out a big attack. He talked the talk, his boys walked the walk. If you need to flesh it out a bit, you could go to the library and look up a book.

Not just "a book;" they could read Mr. Steyn's excellent Face of the Tiger. This collection of his columns from the period around 9-11 should be read every year around the anniversary of the attacks. Mr. Steyn captured the outrage we all felt but expressed it in his own inimitable style.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 18, 2006 7:44 AM