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Patriotism's back in fashion in America, and the leftist nay-sayers who predicted heavy U.S. casualties and other dire consequences as a result of our desire to eradicate Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network and its Taliban sponsors are looking this week for other things to whine about.
Like the overwhelming majority of my countrymen, I threw my support solidly behind President George W. Bush shortly before 9 a.m. EST on the morning of Sept. 11. A Democrat, I was proud of the way the Senate put politics aside to quickly respond to the President's requests for emergency power and funding.
Never before had I known such righteous outrage, such a personal and perhaps primal urge for retribution, justice and, yes, vengeance.
Normal life, of course, changed little. Our leaders told us the best thing we could do is go about our normal routines. We continued to put out the paper, eat lunch in restaurants and discuss the many causes of the Bills' miserable season. But given the dramatic and unprecedented nature of the unfolding events, the awareness of a certain banality seeped in.
Following the war's progress on television, I felt a strange inner satisfaction as city after Afghan city fell to American air power and Northern Alliance troops. The historic new alliance between Russia and the United States represents the final nail in the coffin of the Cold War, something almost unimaginable for those of my generation who were taught in elementary school how to "duck and cover" in the event of a nuclear attack.
I felt no sense of either pity or outrage when the New York Times chose to publish a series of photographs of a Taliban terrorist being castrated and then shot by a group of Afghan freedom fighters.
And when Heather Mercer and her colleagues were rescued unharmed last week despite all the bombing and bloodshed going on around them, well, a case for divine intervention could most certainly be made. And I'm sincerely looking forward to the day -- it won't be long -- when Vice President Dick Cheney gets the present he asked for on Tim Russert's "Meet the Press" back in September -- bin Laden's head on a platter.
All that said, I find myself this week locked on the horns of a dilemma. Because from out of the closet, the President and his men have pulled out a series of brain-dead proposals designed to "restore confidence in the economy."
Predictably, all of the measures are old Republican chestnuts -- a big-oil energy program, fast track trade legislation and billions in tax breaks for corporations and top bracket individuals -- repackaged to take full advantage of the renewed patriotism most Americans now feel.
Will my patriotism be called into question if I am critical of a taxpayer-funded airline bailout that allows corporate CEO's to continue "earning" millions each year while laying off thousands of employees? One such CEO, United's John Creighton Jr., also sits on the board of Unocal, a California-based oil company that gave millions of dollars to the Taliban during the 1990s in the hope of getting the concession to develop Afghanistan's oil reserves.
Am I a traitor to oppose a cut in the capital gains tax for the wealthy, eliminating the corporate alternative minimum tax and the restoration of the deductible "three-martini" business lunch?
And be it treason to say that GE should have to clean up the PCB's it dumped into the Hudson River over the last 50 years? (The state fishing guide says it's OK to eat striped bass out of the river, so long as you don't eat too many and aren't a pregnant woman or a young child.) Or to speak out against drilling for oil in the protected Alaskan wilderness?
Somehow I doubt it.
Regular people don't seem to have lost "confidence in the economy" in any event. Consumer spending was up a healthy 7.1 percent in October, fueled largely by a record-breaking 26.4 percent increase in new car sales.
But God Bless America, and if President Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld or anyone else could show me how deducting the cordials I had with lunch today could help break the back of international terrorism, I'll be the first to hop on board.