[MavKikiNYC]

I saw a couple of Bush campaign ads previewed last night, which included media images of the WTC after it had been attacked. I didn't find anything offensive about them at all, but I didn't find them to be particularly effective either. Bush campaign will need to do more than what I saw for him to be able to press his advantage and remind voters of the very real national security and foreign policy accomplishments that his administration has achieved.

As empathetic as one might feel toward family members of vicitms of the 9/11 attack, I'm not sure that their opposition to the ads means all that much, other than as an instrument of emotional appeal being exploited by those attempting to decry the Bush campaign. I could have predicted this response months ago, before the ads were ever conceived and composed. Many of the most vocal family members of 9-11 attack vicitms act as if their perspective should be deferred to in all matters, and that their interests and their vision of how the victims should be memorialized should be placed ahead of any interest of the survivors, or of the cities and the nation that were left in the wake of the attacks.

With all due respect and sympathy to the families of the victims, they were not the only ones affected by the attacks--it was far more than an attack on the individual victims and their families; they were acts of war against the American people. Preisdent Bush responded with boldness and a decisiveness to defend Americans and American cities from further destruction and attacks, and indeed to transform geopolitics to reduce the likelihood of such attacks in the future. I have no confidence whatsoever that a Gore-led administration (or indeed any Dim-adminstration) would have had the vision, courage or conviction to respond in what was, as far as I'm concerned, the MOST appropriate manner, if not the ONLY appropriate manner--declaring war on Afghanistan and Iraq, and degrading the world-wide network of governments and terrorists organizatons against whom previous Clinton-led Dim administrations had shamefully failed to act, and who were allowed to grow into a global threat with the capacity to disrupt both national and international economies and alter day-to-day life for millions and millions of people. And while I understand and may even agree with many of the oppositions to the Homeland Security Act and the Patriot Act, by the same token it's impossible to deny the necessity of such measures to insure national security in the face of what amounted to acts of war.

I hope that the Bush/Cheney 2004 campaign will always be able to articulate the national security accomplishments of the Bush administration with a sensitivity to those who were directly affected and who suffered the greatest personal loss, but I think that it is perfectly justifiable to refer to these events in describing the virtually unprecedented national challenges that Bush has presided over. Indeed, Bush's campaign would be foolish and playing into the Dims hands NOT to.