We said “never forget.” Well, we haven’t forgotten the heroism of people like Rick Rescorla, the Flight 93 passengers, the firefighters who charged up the WTC stairs, or the volunteers who set up the American Dunkirk evacuation of lower Manhattan by boat.

But we have forgotten the criminal negligence of our political leaders and intelligence services that got us to that point. We should have purged the incompetents then. Instead, they’re still running the show. The country is still sound, but the people in charge of it have only gotten worse.

[It goes deeper than that. Faced with incontrovertible evidence that the world remained a serious and dangerous place, we instead focused on the silly and inconsequential even more obstinately than before. What’s been driving politics the last decade or more? Same-sex marriage and the transgender agenda rather than national security, fixing the borders and the visa processes, and sustaining a forward strategy on threats from abroad. — Ed]