An Invasion of Dragons

At the American Digest, The Fifth Estate's Agenda: No, We Don't Know There's A War On.

LAST MONTH Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit was taken to task for a time because of his standard catch-phrase, "Don't you know there's a war on?" To his critics it would seem as if this question, from sheer repetition, was a weak reed to use in criticizing others. In a way it is, but what is more interesting is the obvious answer to that question.
That answer , to judge by the rolling defeatism of the last week or so, is "No, most Americans evidently do not know that there's a war on."
(snip)

Ask yourself what your day in this war consists of. Unless you are in the military, it consists really of very little other than the unremitting bad news about the war. You work, you shop, you watch TV, you putter about your house, you get and you spend, and, if you have the money, there is nothing on God's green earth that is denied you. Your sacrifice for this war amounts to, to date, absolutely nothing.
Your feelings about this war , unless you are very alert, are in the main manipulated and determined by the tacit collusion of several generations of ex-Vietnam/Watergate media professionals and their professional children and grandchildren. These people, now institutionalized, form what is for all intents and purposes both a Fifth Column and, more importantly, a Fifth Estate -- an unelected and self-appointed shadow government that was not envisioned by the Founding Fathers, and hence is not provided for in their system of checks and balances.

(snip)

Those that know of other narratives are seldom, if ever, admitted to the mainstream media coven except as tokens. And then, you can be sure, they are only tolerated and shunned. Over the decades since Vietnam, our media has evolved into a self-sustaining series of institutions that literally cannot see anything other than their internal elite reality. This would be benign if they did not also have the power to inflict it on others. The destruction of this power is the real pivot on which the political fights of the next decade will turn.
Unless we run out of time in which to entertain this cute little internal cultural and political squabble. Unless, of course, many of us wake up one morning to find that there is, after all, a real war on -- one that can reach out and kill us at will.
In this manner, it is both tragic and yet hopeful, that our current war, in order to be really on, waits upon another September 11. For, it is clear now as it has been for sometime, that nothing absent another significant attack on the homeland will wake us from our media induced stupor. A war that takes place half a world away and requires no sacrifices at all from the majority of our citizens is, frankly, no war at all.

So, in the final analysis, what will it take for America to wake up and to stay awake, and to finally and at last, "know there is a war on?"
Quite obviously and without a doubt, it will take thousands of dead American civilians: men, women and this time our children too. They will die here on our soil because we did not have the will, the policies, and the guts to pursue this war as a war, using all the terrible power that we command. The dead will be your family and your friends and your neighbors. They will be the cost of the current administration's vapid policies coupled with the unremitting agenda of the Fifth Estate.
That is precisely what it will take. Not one body more. Not one body less. And although our enemy will be at fault, we will have nobody but our own weak and fat souls to blame. After all, we won't be able to say we didn't see it coming this time.

Part of me wishes for another attack, if only that I agree so much with Vanderleun that nothing else will end the blindness and stupidity of our national media and news conglomerates, who should be leading the charge against our real enemy, the enemy of all civilization, the Islamofascists. They're still at war with Nixon.