Inside the Beltway

America’s ‘hush’

This columnist has often wondered why it is that every time al Qaeda opens its collective mouth with murderous taunts and threats against Americans that more of us don’t react in kind.

Apart from New York City firefighter Michael Moran, who walked onto the stage of the post-9/11 benefit Concert for New York and told off Osama bin Laden in no uncertain terms, the majority of us choose to go about our daily lives and ignore the terrorists’ menacing barrage of forebodings.

Now I’m beginning to understand why.

Washington pundit Diana West, a fellow columnist at The Washington Times, among other publications, just wrote “The Death of the Grown-Up,” which wonders whether American adults — PresidentBush included — will ever grow up?

“No wonder we can’t stop Islamic terrorism,” writes the author, suggesting that since the late 1960s, America’s “youth-obsessed” culture — from guitar-playing baby boomers to Generation X-ers — has multiplied at the expense of reason, decency and good taste, leaving us with a nation of “eternal adolescents,” and generation of permissive parents, teachers and government officials.

“We can look to the thick, blanketing fog of political correctness that hangs over the political landscape, shrouding difference, obscuring significance, and clouding debate. But something besides what we know as ‘PC’ plays into the resulting hush,” Ms. West writes.

“The uniformity of the silence, from Left to Right, from academia to politics to journalism, tells us we have moved beyond PC to a more profound, more enveloping level of orthodoxy.”

Even when fighting an escalating terrorism threat that already has so dramatically changed our lives.

“Ultimately, I came to understand this as a post-adult moment because it felt as if no grown-ups were speaking up; indeed, it became alarmingly clear that there were no grown-ups to speak up.”

How’d they do that?

How did the White House manage to keep yesterday’s surprise presidential visit to Iraq’s Anbar province shrouded in secrecy?

President Bush’s third trip to Iraq since the start of the war “was a tightly held secret” planned for about six weeks, or so we read in the White House pool report.

Washington-based reporters who accompanied the president to Iraq were only telephoned over the Labor Day weekend and summoned for “individual, face-to-face” meetings at the White House, and were informed they would not make a Monday-morning trip to Australia “as had been publicly announced, but Sunday between 6:00 and 6:30 p.m. Reporters were given maps of Andrews [Air Force Base] with our rallying point highlighted,” we read.

As for Mr. Bush, he “slipped out of a side door of the White House and then off the White House grounds” in what was a rare, two-car motorcade “in an effort to keep the subterfuge going.”

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