Small child is scanned for metal objects before entering San Francisco Giants game, 4/19/13. Impeding the innocent since 9/11/01

4/19/13, "A child waits to be electronically scanned for metal  objects before entering AT &T Park for San Diego Padres vs. San Francisco Giants game in San Francisco," ap, final 3-2 Giants

"At home, the American people are less free, less prosperous...and much less hopeful...because a decade of the War on Terror brought a government ever bigger and more burdensome, as well as “security” measures that impede the innocent rather than focusing on wrongdoers. Our ruling class justified its ever-larger role in America’s domestic life by redefining war as a never-ending struggle against unspecified enemies for abstract objectives, and by asserting expertise far above that of ordinary Americans....September 11's planners could hardly have imagined that their attacks might seriously undermine what Americans had built over two centuries, what millions of immigrants from the world over had come to join and maintain. In fact, our decline happened because the War on Terror—albeit microscopic in size and destructiveness as wars go—forced upon us, as wars do, the most important questions that any society ever faces:

Who are we, and who are our enemies? What kind of peace do we want? What does it take to get it? Are we able and willing to do what it takes to secure our preferred way of life, to deserve living the way we prefer? Our bipartisan ruling class's dysfunctional responses to such questions inflicted the deepest wounds....

America's current ruling class, the people who lost the War on Terror, monopolizes the upper reaches of American public life, the ranks of those who make foreign and domestic policy, including the leadership of the Republican and Democratic parties. It is more or less homogeneous socially and intellectually. In foreign affairs, the change from the Bush to the Obama Administrations was barely noticeable. In domestic matters, the differences are more quantitative than qualitative. Dissent from the ruling class is rife among the American people, but occurs mostly on the sidelines of our politics....

But U.S. policy has made things worse because the liberal internationalists, realists, and neoconservatives who make up America's foreign policy Establishment have all assumed that Americans should undertake the impossible task of changing such basic facts, rather than confining themselves to the difficult but vital work of guarding U.S. interests against them. For the Establishment, 9/11 meant opportunities to press for doing more of what they had always tried to do....

After 9/11, far from deliberating on the best course to take, our rulers stayed on autopilot and hit the throttles....And indeed, ever since the 1970s U.S. policy had responded to acts of war and terrorism from the Muslim world by absolving the regimes for their subjects’ actions. For example, when Yasser Arafat’s PLO murdered U.S. ambassador Cleo Noel, our government continued building friendly relations with Arafat, and romancing the Saudi regime that was financing him....That message indicts America, among other things, for being weak."...10/20/11, "The lost decade," Angelo M. Codevilla, Claremont Institute

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UK Daily Mail has many wonderful pictures.

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