This day has become an unofficial holiday for Red Team. Members of Conservative Inc get to go on TV and act solemn and serious, maybe even say a bad word about Islam. The Forever War crowd gets to compare some batch of Muslim fanatics to Hitler, demanding we blow them up before, wait for it, we have another 9/11. The only good thing is Lefty stays home and hides under his bed. Otherwise, Derbyshire is right on this one. You don’t celebrate great failures or humiliations.

Jim Geraghty has this on his blog.

We remember how the 9/11 era began today, and the emotions are still fresh and strong, 13 years later.

But that was only one part of the story.

Take a good look, ISIS. You never know when the U.S. Navy SEALs are at your door.

My response:

Not really. It was a stunning failure by our rulers, for sure, but not one worth remembering. If our rulers had learned from their blunders leading up to 9/11, then sure. But, they learned nothing. They continue to troll Muslim countries for immigrants. Inviting people who want you dead to settle in your lands is madness, but here we are anyway.

If anything, our rulers drew all the wrong lessons. They reasoned that the Muslims attacked America because it was full of Americans. If they could just replace all the Americans with foreign imports, problem solved! Since 9/11 Muslim immigration has gone up with over one million of them coming here from places like Yemen, Syria and Iraq.

I guess if you want to get weepy on 9/11, the thought that our rulers are not the only people who want us dead is a good reason.

The lesson of 9/11 is big bureaucracies are not good at this stuff. That’s not what they are built for, which is why they fail at small, complex tasks. Government is a sledgehammer, not a scalpel. In order to prevent another 9/11, we should have immediately ended all immigration from Muslim countries. Visas for visiting should have been limited to diplomatic and high level trade. If an oil sheik needs to come here to do a deal with Exxon, fine.

Further, Muslims here should have been deported if they were not citizens. The foreign funding for mosques should have been confiscated. We can’t ban the religion, although I would be in favor of it, but we can encourage our citizens to put out the unwelcome mat to Muslims. Islam is a fine religion that brings its adherent happiness. It is incompatible western democracy. It is hostile to western culture. We should have learned that 13 years ago. Our rulers learned the opposite.

Happy 9/11