Today, I’ll be thinking less about the World Trade Center and more about my father and the relentless – probably unique – ability of New York City to bury its dead and move on without a backward glance.

My father was born in Manhattan in 1923, in a tenement building off Columbus Circle. A few years later, he moved to Brooklyn, a borough that was considered the country back then, a place that had more horses than cars. By the time he left there for good in 1966, it wasn’t the country anymore, that’s for sure.

He worked for Sea-Land, a shipping company that was one of the World Trade Center’s original tenants, and one of my very earliest memories is of my older brother and me playing in the company’s unfinished offices in one of the towers before the complex opened to the public in 1973.

Like many, probably most, New Yorkers, my father hated the Twin Towers at first, preferring the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, which had gone up during his childhood.

He’d seen King Kong when it came out in 1933, he explained, and he just couldn’t see the big ape climbing the towers. By the late ‘70s – after Philippe Petit tightrope walked across them, George Willig scaled them, Owen Quinn parachuted from them, and King Kong himself had been shot off them in a 1976 remake – he’d come around.

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“…on a day when others tried to divide us, we can regain the sense of common purpose that stirred in our hearts 10 years ago. As a nation, we face difficult challenges, and as citizens in a democratic society we engage in vigorous debates about the future. But as we do, let’s never forget the lesson we learned anew 10 years ago — that our differences pale beside what unites us and that when we choose to move forward together, as one American family, the United States doesn’t just endure, we can emerge from our tests and trials stronger than before. That’s the America we were on 9/11 and in the days that followed. That’s the America we can and must always be.”
– Pres. Barack Obama, USA Today, Sept. 8, 2011

Ten year have passed since the Islamist attacks on the United States of America; attacks that killed 2,977 people in New York, Washington, DC and Shanksville, PA. Since that time we have routed the Taliban from their haven in Afghanistan, dispatched Osama bin Laden to the icy deep and lopped off many of the heads of the Islamist terror hydra. We have grown as a people to better understand the dysfunctional relationship that the Islamic theo-political dogma has with Western Culture. And we have done our best to attain closure, for ourselves, for our society and for our country.

But closure can be hard to attain when there are no bodies to bury and no pointed victory over a vanquished foe. And when closure alludes because of unresolved issues we must always re-examine the event; the moment; the realities.

At the ten year mark, an American president is foolishly stopping short of succeeding in a generational conflict with fundamentalist Islamists…or radical Islamists…or jihadists, you pick the politically correct term the Progressive-Left elitists are sanctioning as appropriate this week. To me, they are the enemy; bloodthirsty ideologues who are committed to ideological conquest by the sword in their quest to establish a global Caliphate existing under the exclusive stricture of Sharia Law. But then, that’s just me…educated on the subject and painfully realistic in my examination. You see, I dispensed with the self-imposed mental handicap of political correctness years ago…and I feel a lot better for having done so. I also see things a lot clearer without the fog of stupidity clouding every issue.

At the ten year mark, a secularist New York Mayor – along with the Progressive elites of his ilk – is advocating for the construction of a victory mosque within the footprint of the fallen World Trade Center. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg, about as self-righteous as they come, is so certain that a “kumbaya” inclusionist approach to fundamentalist Islam will heal the rift between cultures that he refuses to examine the Islamic traditions of conquest; traditions that include building great mosques over conquered lands and, in particular, conquered religious properties. One need only understand that mosques now stand over holy places meaningful to religions that existed long before Muhammad or the theo-political creed that is Islam, established in 610 A.D., to validate this reality.

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It was a brilliant summer day in a world at peace. The world’s superpowers, once locked into conflict by irreconcilable ideologies, were now alike committed to stable, prosperous co-existence. Their vast military establishments, they said, existed solely for self-defense. Except in a few backward lands, horsetrading had replaced brinksmanship.

New industrial and information technologies were annihilating distance, uniting mankind and globalizing the world economy. The English language had leaped far beyond its island home, and now knit together hundreds of millions of people on four continents. Medical advances were rapidly stretching the human lifespan, while new agricultural methods offered hope of eradicating hunger. Research, science, and philosophies of progress had weakened the hold of religion in countries that once had fought bloody doctrinal conflicts and persecuted dissenters. Transnational organizations in defense of human rights were striving with rising success to eliminate evils like forced labor and torture, and reform movements in once-tyrannical countries promised to gradually introduce democracy. Man had become, more than ever before, the measure of all things, and political philosophers predicted with confidence that mankind’s self-destructive history was drawing to an end; we had entered a new and perhaps the final phase of human development, an age of reason. The sun that dawned that morning shone bright as all our hopes in a sky almost clear of clouds.

So it was on June 28, 1914 in Sarajevo, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand came to visit. So also on September 11, 2001 in Manhattan, as millions of New Yorkers made their way to work. Those of us who remember what occurred just ten years ago should know that all of it happened once before: an act of political terror committed by a small band of conspirators plunged the world into a conflict that would take on a life and logic of its own—claiming countless lives, causing undreamt-of destruction, consuming vast resources, making mincemeat of ancient liberties, reviving bloodthirsty fanaticisms that enlightened people had thought long-dead, toppling governments, causing ethnic cleansing that displaced millions of civilians, and plunging the wealthiest part of the world into economic stagnation and crippling debt. The fact that history grimly repeats itself should only surprise those who do not believe in original sin—which means that it surprises almost everybody.

What can we learn from reading these two great signposts of disillusion? Perhaps there is no useful lesson we may draw beyond a bitter irony, a grim smile of agreement with Rudyard Kipling:

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

But that is too easy, isn’t it?

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I chose to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11 by running throughout Manhattan, on a 14-mile route that took me from the East Village down to Ground Zero, up to the Central Park Reservoir, and back down through Midtown.

The day started with a brilliant blue sky, almost like the sky of that Tuesday ten years ago. The flags on the Brooklyn Bridge were at half-mast in the early morning.

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My memories of September 11, 2001 are likely little different than those of so many others. Thankfully, no one I knew died in those attacks, but I mourned just the same; and in that way one can ever truly recover from such a thing, I still do and always will mourn.

Ten years on, my emotions have evolved, however. Because for ten years I’ve watched the Left, much of Hollywood and almost all of the news media turn against our country for mercenary, partisan political reasons. And none of this surprised me. In the aftermath of the atrocity as solemn celebrities hosted benefit concerts and Democrats sang “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps, I knew it wouldn’t last and that over time they would become America’s enemy within in the fight to protect herself. I never even took a moment to hope I was wrong. Why waste the energy.

If you recall, we had seen it all before. We saw it when after spending years undermining a war of liberation with the Killing Fields of Cambodia as a direct result, the Left never once stopped to second guess themselves.

With great pride I watched my cousin Kyle join the military when the war was at its ugliest and just last week my grandson Mikey left boot camp and started his hazmat training with National Guard. With horror I’ve watched the Left use every dishonest trick and tool at their disposal to make their jobs harder.

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9/11…A tragic day when Islamic terrorists from Al Qaeda hijacked commercial jets and used them to destroy the WTC, hit the Pentagon and crashed another hijacked plane in Shanksville, PA. 3,000 innocent lives, Americans and foreigners of all sizes, colors, languages, religions, were killed that day. All Americans were shocked, mortified, caught completely off guard. Around the world, some mourned, others cheered.

9/11…We all remember what it is and what happened, and we vowed to never forget it. But the true meaning of NEVER FORGET is not to forget what 9/11 means, to our nation and to free people around the world and to never forget our mission. I have never actually tried to put together “what it means” in its totality and scope because the far reaching impact it had on my life and where I was in my life at the time.  I liken it to being asked “What was BUDS like?” or “What’s it like to be a Navy SEAL?”

These questions are just unanswerable in a sitting.  They will usually elicit a response of “Really?” or “You will have to come up with some better questions than that.”  My quick and ready answer is the first line of a Dickens book “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”  Then I just walk away.

9/11…It ripped me to the core — being that I grew up not forty miles away in — Upstate New Jersey and had some people that I knew in there as most of us in the area did.  Plus, growing up in New Jersey, you were used to seeing New York City on the horizon when we would climb to the top of the Mountain behind my house.  I used to visit my grandparents and cousins that lived out on Remsen and we would see the towers as we would go by on the GWB past Yankee Stadium.  We would sometimes go into the city and go to the towers to ride in the elevators and jump when it got to the top and you would almost slam into the ceiling or to feel almost weightless as you would plummet so fast.  Those buildings were HUGE!!! You may have seen them on TV but until you have seen them up close and personal you don’t get the full scope of what happened there.

About 4 days before 9/11, in 2001, I was a young Navy SEAL and had just graduated from SQT, which is the last hurdle to get through before reporting to your assigned Team or Platoon.  I was happy and excited to be a Frogman and there wasn’t a care in the world for me. Like firemen, you don’t wish for people to get into accidents or for their houses to get burnt down but you want to get out there and play in the big game being that you are finally in the Big Leagues.  I wanted to test my skills somewhere in the world and there really wasn’t much going on in the world.  I wanted something to happen in the world so the SEALs can go save somebody or kill some bad guys….. I remember thinking that my generation had nothing to show other than for the advent of the computer and video games, and this was about two before 9/11.  Little did I know the Horror that awaited a nation……. MY NATION!

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People have vivid memories of certain tragic events in our history. It used to be common to hear folks ask, “Where were you when JFK was shot?” Or, “What were you doing when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated?” Tragedies etch themselves into our collective psyche and the things we were doing at the time we first heard the news, or witnessed events first-hand, help us to remember.

Such is the case with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Not since Japan’s World War II attack on Pearl Harbor has the United States had its territorial sovereignty violated by such aggression. Everyone who was alive on 9/11/01 recalls today what they were doing, and how they reacted, felt, grieved, mourned, and prayed. For most Americans, that grief, sadness and prayer will never end.

Faith becomes more important to people when they are faced with the loss of loved ones. Religious ceremonies typically accompany the burial process, and the same holds true for memorial events like the upcoming September 11, 2011 ten-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks. Except that in the case of the ceremony to be held at the site of the World Trade Center– Ground Zero – Mayor Michael Bloomberg has put the kibosh on having religion be a part of it.

It is a decision that seems to defy all logic and commonsense, and it comes off as cruel, heartless, and suggests Hizzoner is out of touch with the people who elected him to be Mayor (not King) of New York City. It falls on the heels of another take-your-breath-away decision about the same event. In mid-August, Mayor Bloomberg nixed inviting first responders to the 10-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the WTC.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Dan McLaughlin to discuss his experience on September 11, 2001, and what the death of Osama bin Laden means to him, the country and the legacy of 9/11.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

WHY BASEBALL STILL MATTERS: My September 11 Story
Bin Laden Announcement Has Highest Sustained Tweet Rate Ever, At 3440 Tweets Per Second
Osama Is Dead. Don’t Believe It Makes Obama Invulnerable to Defeat
Coffee & Markets: The Symbolism of Osama Bin Laden’s Death

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss the death of Osama Bin Laden – what it means for New York, the President and the markets.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Osama bin Laden Killed: ‘Justice Is Done,’ President Says
40 Minutes That Changed the World: Inside the Operation That Brought Bin Laden Down
Ben: In Osama’s Death, a Vindication of Obama’s Choices
Don’t Get Cocky, America
New labor plan: Nationwide protests
Blair Expresses Gratitude, Relief at Bin Laden’s Death
Musharraf condemns ‘violation of our sovereignty’

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Try to remember how you felt on the days after the horrible events of September 11, 2001. I remember our country experiencing something close to Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous stages of grief. Except instead of “acceptance” being the final stage,  our nation swelled with an enormous sense of patriotism and resolve best represented by the bi-partisan members of Congress singing “God Bless America” on the steps of the Capitol, President George W. Bush’s rallying rescue workers on a pile of rubble, and flags being flown on almost every porch in America. Do you remember those days and those feelings? Now, ask yourself:  What kind of person would instead take the occasion of the day after the attack to lead a rally condemning America and holding the terrorist murderers up as martyred heroes?

Van Jones is that kind of person.

In a recently discovered video, the former White House appointee and current hero of the liberal elite and de-facto Huffington Post/AOL editorial director is seen telling the adoring crowd,  “It’s the bombs that the government has been dropping around the world that are now blowing up inside the U.S. borders.”  He said this after a whole host of speakers from the radical fringe fringe denounced our country and her policies and hijacked the tragedy to justify unloading a laundry list of cliched, left-wing reasons to blame America for the acts perpetrated by radical Islamist totalitarian terrorists.

Remember, this rally was taking place while the bodies of 3,000 Americans were still smoldering in the rubble of the World Trade Center and American heroes were putting their lives at risk at ground zero in a massive humanitarian effort.  What kind of monsters would use this occasion to turn Americans against one another?

It’s no wonder that this man is embraced and honored by groups like the once-relevant, now-radical NAACP and was given the high honor of holding a Presidential appointment in the first year of the Obama Presidency.  He speaks the revolutionary “blame America first” rhetoric of Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Malik Zulu Shabazz.

What is curious and confounding is that a major corporation like AOL is allowing a person with this kind of record to influence the content of their influential website through the intimidation tactics of Color Of Change, the anti-free speech organization he founded.

In light of this latest video revelation, Mr. Jones needs to finally explain, fully, his position on 9/11. Was it American bombs that caused the World Trade Center to fall as he suggested at this rally? Was the American government behind the attack as he once signed a petition purporting? Does he agree with his co-speaker that evening that the terrorist murderers were “heroes” or does he condemn that hateful rhetoric?

And finally, what is the AOL/HuffPo’s position on Mr. Jones’ contribution to their site?  Does his hateful attack on America rise to their new editorial standard used against me?

Take a moment and sign our petition demanding that the Huffington Post not buckle under to the intimidation tactics of this man and the anti-free speech organization he founded. Make your voice heard. Speak truth to power.

Addendum:  The video discussed in this post was originally posted by BizzyBlog in September, 2009.  It was reported on at the time by PowerLine.

In the six days that followed the attacks on September 11^th, the New York Stock Exchange was closed for the first and longest time ever since the Great Depression and World War I.  The markets would reopen on September 17^th, but to quite a rocky start.  During the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the heartbeat of our nation’s economy stopped, suspended in time.  And a forgotten class of Wall Street workers faced the difficult decision of whether or not to return to work. Those who did would return to a completely different world, one that had already changed them forever.  And today, nine years later, many of them are still there.  In a polarized political environment where the bad behavior of a few has unfairly demonized all of Wall Street’s workers, their contributions to our post-9/11 recovery have been largely ignored.  But had these workers made the choice back in 2001 never to return again, what might have happened?  This is one story, out of many, of the courage, determination and dignity of an entire class of forgotten patriots who stood by their country in the aftermath of September 11^th, 2001 when it would have been so easy to simply walk away.

Nine years ago, my brother Will was working for a Wall Street brokerage firm just steps away from what is now known as Ground Zero.  His office building overlooked Trinity Church on one side and the World Trade Center on the other.  Just on the other side of the river, near his home in Hoboken, NJ, he boarded the PATH train every day, bound for the bustling station at the World Trade Center.  Like so many others, he went to work on September 11^th thinking that day would be just like any other.

Just before 8:46 am as Will was settling into his day with his co-workers, a loud, screeching sound of shearing metal boomed just outside their building.  He looked up at the trading desk manager, and both were stunned.  Will thought it might be a high rise construction accident; the desk manager suspected an explosion.

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The “Ground Zero” Mosque project should not go forward and let’s hope that Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf that is behind this $100 million project gets this message and backs off.

But given what he is hearing from the liberals in New York, including the city’s Mayor, the congressman in whose district Ground Zero sits, and the New York Times, it’s hard to be optimistic that he will change his mind.

Opposition to the Mosque is being portrayed, as the New York Times editorial page put it, as abandoning “the principles of freedom and tolerance.”  But the Times makes its own tenuous grasp of reality clear as it goes on in its editorial embracing the Mosque and Islamic Center to say that “The attacks of September 11 were not a religious event.”

We can only wonder what those at the Times think was motivating the young Muslims who, while embracing their Korans and chanting to Allah, committed suicide, taking 3000 innocent Americans to their deaths along with them.

The website for the project, the Cordoba Initiative, advertises itself as “Improving Muslim-West Relations”, and “steering the world back to the course of mutual recognition and respect and away from heightened tensions.”

But if Feisel Abdul Rauf is primarily motivated to “reduce heightened tensions,” why would he do something as obviously provocative as building a Mosque and Islamic Center a few feet away from 9/11 Ground Zero?

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Dear Imam Rauf and Daisy Khan,

The remains of another seventy-two people were discovered on Friday not far from where you plan to build a thirteen-story Islamic center and mosque. Here we are, close to ten years after the largest jihadist attack ever to take place on American soil, and bodies, corpses, are still being recovered. Who knows how many body parts were found in the Burlington Coat Factory building when the landing gear crashed through all five floors? Thousands were never recovered. Their cemetery, their burial ground, is the area in and around Ground Zero. not far from where you plan to build a thirteen-story Islamic center and mosque. Here we are, close to ten years after the largest jihadist attack ever to take place on American soil, and bodies, corpses, are still being recovered. Who knows how many body parts were found in the Burlington Coat Factory building when the landing gear crashed through all five floors? Thousands were never recovered. Their cemetery, their burial ground, is the area in and around Ground Zero.

Of course, as one of the leaders of the opposition to the painful and strangely thoughtless “Cordoba Initiative,” my group SIOA will be pursuing legal avenues to stop or at least dramatically slow down the building of this mosque on the site that many consider to be a war memorial, while also staging mega-protests and sit-ins if and when construction begins, etc. But must it come to that?

You and I are New Yorkers. We  are Americans, first. You, too, felt the devastating pain and anguish when the military arm of Islam (al qaeda) unleashed its attack on America on September 11th. The gaping hole at Ground Zero is a constant reminder of that terrible war.

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Imagine the American response in 1950 if the Japanese government sought to erect a shrine to its World War II Emperor in Pearl Harbor, right next to the sunken wreckage of the USS Arizona.

Would “outrage” be strong enough to describe the response?

Now fast forward to 2010.

Less than nine years after the worst terrorist attack on American soil in our history, an imam who blames America for the 9/11 attack wants to construct a 13 story, $100 million dollar mosque and Islamic center 600 feet from “Ground Zero.”

And he wants to unveil it to the world on September 11, 2011 – the ten year anniversary of the greatest jihadist atrocity ever perpetrated against America on its own soil.

News and blog sites across the country are heating up over this.  ACT! for America, the nation’s largest grassroots organization dedicated to combating radical Islam and global jihad, today launched a national petition opposing the mosque, which says in part:

We are opposed to the grotesque symbolism represented by the building of this mosque at “ground zero…”  We are deeply disturbed by the insensitivity to the families of the victims of the 9/11 jihadist attack exhibited by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his supporters.

As a measure of the public’s outrage , over 5,000 people had signed the petition in the first three hours.

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I was thinking about opening up a Japanese cultural center across the water from the sunken USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor. Just as soon as I lay the cornerstone of a new German Brauhaus on the grounds of Auschwitz. What’s the problem? After all, not all Japanese attacked us on Dec. 7. And I reckon most Germans are genuinely ashamed and horrified by the crimes of the Holocaust committed in their  name. Insensitive nonetheless? Even insulting, despite the passage of time and goodness of these two nations far removed from their WW2 past? Of course it is. Which is why no one in their right mind would propose such hypothetical projects.

I guess the key phrase here is “in their right mind” because wouldn’t you know it, a plan to build what would, at 15 stories, be the largest community center/mosque in New York City is being hotly debated at the moment. Why the debate? Because its location will be only two blocks from the World Trade Center Ground Zero site. Yes. You read that correctly. And just like in my hypothetical examples I set forth above, the obvious question arises: why there?

First, a little background on the mosque’s sponsors helps frame the discussion. The imam leading the project is Faisal Abdul Rauf. Like many imams, Rauf seems to be a split personality. If one were to pull up CNN’s website or open up the NY Times, one would be dutifully fed the story of a soft-spoken introspective man. A respected religious and community leader who is dedicated to reaching across the chasm of religious animus to achieve peaceful co-existence with his Western hosts. A man with a sonorous voice and hypnotic charm who, according to his book What’s Right With Islam wants the mosque to be a place where inter-faith understanding is fostered. Aww shucks!

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He left office a year ago today. He has maintained a dignified silence in the last twelve months — even though his successor denounces him in almost every speech and acts as if he is still running against the man. I reviewed President Obama’s disastrous first year on Saturday. Today, I ask, “What, in retrospect, should we think of George W. Bush?”

The first thing that needs to be said is that he meant well. He is not a vindictive man, and he sought to put behind him the controversies and turmoil of the Clinton years. He thought that his focus would be domestic policy, but, as tends to happen, events intervened.

Had it not been for 9/11, George W. Bush would probably have been a one-term President. He fell short of his adversary in the popular vote but won a majority in the electoral college. He was destined to be weak — but when disaster struck, he was in the line of fire, and he rose to the occasion.

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It seems the Democrats have the art of poor taste down to a science.  Who else would think to use an image of the World Trade Center, destroyed by terrorists in 2001 because the towers were a symbol of American greed, to attack a Republican candidate over Wall Street “greed?”

According to Politico, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee ran an ad against Republican Scott Brown, accusing him of opposing a “plan to crack down on greed and corruption.”

Just when I think the Democrats can’t stoop any lower to retain the seat of the former champion of socialized medicine, they sink to using the tragedy of the World Trade Center.  But not in a way to say that Martha Coakley will stand up to terrorists - oh no, instead its used to exemplify what they see as the worst of America.

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From Politico:

From the time he launched his campaign for president three years ago, Barack Obama had to consider how he would react to the first serious act of terrorism during the campaign, or if he won, on his watch. His fellow Democrats had been thinking about the moment even longer – since the September day in 2001 when attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon defined George W. Bush’s presidency and gave Republicans a decisive advantage on a defining political issue.

And yet the White House’s response to last week’s attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit could rank as one of the low points of the new president’s first year. Over the course of five days, Obama’s Obama’ reaction ranged from low-keyed to reassuring to, finally, a vow to find out what went wrong. The episode was a baffling, unforced error in presidential symbolism, hardly a small part of the presidency, and the moment at which yet another of the old political maxims that Obama had sought to transcend – the Democrats’ vulnerability on national security – reasserted itself.

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The hidden-camera videos by James O‘Keefe and Hannah Giles detailing the inner workings of the taxpayer-funded leftist racket known as ACORN have set off a storm of journalistic controversy, but not in the way one might think.  Rather than engaging the substance of the stories first made available on Big Government and later on Fox News – that ACORN, to put it generously, seems to be staffed by an inordinate number of employees blithely willing to aid and, if possible, abet criminal activity – the dinosaur media has reacted not by investigating the message but by attacking the messengers, all in the name of “journalistic ethics.”

Now, when a “journalist” – I prefer the days when we called ourselves “reporters” – starts lecturing his readers about the saintly nature of “journalism” you know that the entropic, self-referential MSM has just about hit bottom.  Long gone, apparently, are the days of the old Front Page, the 1928 play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur – filmed four times – that lovingly limned the street-smart, ink-stained wretches (in the late Herb Caen’s famous phrase) who would stop at nothing to Get The Story.  For decades – and certainly when I started in “journalism” in 1971 – this was model of the enterprising reporter: check your conscience at the bar, get the story, go home, go to bed, get up the next morning and do it all over again.  These guys were our heroes:

Not pursuing a legitimate news story, as James Rainey and the rest of the Pecksniffian  bien-pensant staff of the once-great Los Angeles Times seem intent on doing, because the young reporters are “agents provocateurs” and “political guerillas,” is bad enough.  Who cares what they are?  It’s like saying Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns are scum-sucking bottom feeders who would steal milk bottles from babies and nickels from newsboys if they thought it was a Page One story; a badge-of-honor insult those old-school newshounds would have worn with pride, alongside the egg stains on their ties and the lipstick on their collars.

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