Do You Feel Safer This Morning? Or Just Lucky?

September 20, 2016

I thought this was a pretty good piece, but awoke this morning to find Hugh Hewitt, Sean Trende, Caleb Howe, and David Frum praising it, so I must have done something right.

As of this writing, America is witnessing something close to its luckiest stretch of days in the war on terror. A homegrown radical Islamist set up multiple bombs but didn't succeed in killing anyone. One bomb, aimed to go off during a marathon, detonated but didn't hurt anyone because registration problems delayed the start of the race. Another went off in Chelsea, injuring 29 people but somehow managing not to kill anyone. A third was accidentally disarmed by a thief stealing the suitcase in which it was planted. Two homeless men discovered other bombs hidden in a trash can and alerted police. Less than a day later, the primary person of interest was captured alive in a shootout with authorities.

Will the bombs allegedly set by Ahmad Khan Rahami be a major factor in this year's presidential race? It depends on whether the electorate sees the events of the last 48 hours as sheer luck or a sign that the U.S. government, for all of its flaws, is succeeding in protecting the public.

If you believe that the country is generally safe from terrorism on U.S. soil, then an event like this is not going to change your mind. As former Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano put it after an unsuccessful attempt to blow up an Amsterdam-Detroit airline flight on Christmas Day 2009, "the system worked." The police this weekend appear to have moved quickly and decisively: They got Rahami's fingerprint from the unexploded bomb, matched him to surveillance videos, put his picture out to the public, and within two hours, a sharp-eyed police officer spotted him sleeping in the vestibule of a bar in Linden, N.J. Despite the fact that he fled and started "indiscriminately firing his weapon at passing vehicles" after the officer confronted him, he was subdued before anyone got seriously hurt.

But if you believe that the federal government and the Obama administration want to downplay the threat of terrorism, then the last 48 hours feels like a series of dodged bullets likely to invite complacency. It began with a strange verbal denial that what looked, sounded, and felt like terrorism might not meet some vague official definition of the term.

Who Is George H. W. Bush Voting For This Year?

A lot of Republicans will not forgive George H. W. Bush for voting for Hillary Clinton.

Bush, 92, had intended to stay silent on the White House race between Clinton and Donald Trump, a sign in and of itself of his distaste for the GOP nominee. But his preference for the wife of his own successor, President Bill Clinton, nonetheless became known to a wider audience thanks to Kathleen Hartington Kennedy Townsend, the former Maryland lieutenant governor and daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy.

On Monday, Townsend posted a picture on her Facebook page shaking hands next to the former president and this caption: "The President told me he's voting for Hillary!!"

In a telephone interview, Townsend said she met with the former president in Maine earlier today, where she said he made his preference known that he was voting for a Democrat. "That's what he said," she told POLITICO.

A spokesman for the former president says he "will cast as a private citizen in some 50 days will be just that: a private vote cast in some 50 days. He is not commenting on the presidential race in the interim."

Now, if you're a former Republican president and you think Donald Trump is the worst possible choice . . . and you somehow think that Hillary Clinton is the best remaining choice (a bridge too far for many Republicans) . . . what good does it do you to tell Kathleen Kennedy Townsend? What, he expected her to be discreet?

A sad, continuing flaw for George H.W. Bush, an underrated president, indisputable war hero, and all-around decent man: he trusted Democrats then, and he still trusts Democrats now.

Thinking About the Future and People's Republic

My friend Kurt Schlichter wrote a new e-book out entitled People's Republic. I think the idea for his novel came at one of the happy hours we attended, where a group of conservative bloggers agreed that blue-state America and red-state America had grown so fundamentally different in values, philosophies, and law, and that a national "divorce" no longer seemed so unthinkable.

The result is People's Republic, set in the not-too-distant future where most of the coastal states have become the People's Republic of North America and the remaining states remain the United States of America. (After reading a review copy, I urged Kurt to include a detailed map of the new border lines. As far as I can tell, the remaining United States consists of Central Virginia, Northwest Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Indiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, West Iowa, West Minnesota, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Arizona, Utah, South California, Idaho, Nevada, West Oregon, and Alaska.)

People's Republic is a surreal, fast-paced journey through a dramatically different America but one less than a generation away: crack-shot Mormons, "militant climate change deniers," trendy genericism, cat tacos, iPhone 16s, "the border in Kentucky," rote protests, "Harry Reid International Airport," and eerie new definitions of "red lies," "Indian country" and "the border wall with Mexico." It's violent, imaginative, full of mordant humor and dark, gritty details.

After reading it, I told Kurt he needed to write a sequel, fleshing out what happened in deep blue corners of red states, like Austin, Denver, Boulder, Atlanta and south Florida . . . Did everybody voluntarily move? We get a good glimpse at the increasingly dire problems of the People's Republic, but how is life in the remaining USA? About 55 million people currently live in the Northeast; let's say one in four decided to move south once it became clear the country was splitting and they wouldn't like the new regime. How did the southern states greet those 12 million or so new carpetbaggers? You can't tell me there wouldn't be some lingering tensions . . .

Judging from the map in the cover illustration, New Hampshire didn't hold out, huh? And the People's Republic got the shipbuilding facilities at Newport News?

We get a few glimpses of the world beyond the continental U.S., particularly Iran and Israel, but part of me wondered whether the camera was diverted away from some serious global consequences of America splitting in two. Does NATO still exist? I'm guessing the People's Republic is not a treaty member? Because of the requirements for citizenship, I presume the remaining U.S. military is quite strong, but is it still spread around the globe, or now largely stateside?

If the U.S. was occupied with even a brief Second Civil War, wouldn't that be a green light to every thuggish regime and tin-pot dictator to make their move? I'm wondering whether Putin would roll into the Baltics, the Norks would attack, China would take Taiwan . . . Kurt's story gives a brief sense of how a conflict between Israel and Iran was resolved, but you have to figure the rest of the Middle East would be full of sudden attacks and territorial aggression . . .

Finally, in an otherwise grim future, Kurt envisions a world where the question of whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie is clearly resolved.

ADDENDA: Remember, Tuesdays at Two, I'm on Facebook Live, on my work Facebook page and, if I can figure out how to make the doohickey work, on NR's Facebook page as well. Ask me any question you like, including, "Hey, how do you make the doohickey work?"