ARE WE TOO POLITICALLY CORRECT TO APPROPRIATELY DEFEND OUR WAY OF LIFE?

I worry our adversaries may have it right -- America is no longer virile
enough, America no longer has the resolve, America has become too silly and
"mommified" and caught up in politically correct fibs and fripperies to win
a protracted struggle for our very existence against a force as elemental
as the Islamic fundamentalist drive to destroy capitalism, western values
... the modern world as we know it.

Last Friday evening, after 84 hours, CNN and the other networks started to
scrape bottom in their attempts to fulfill their "24-hour" commitment to
covering the destruction of the World Trade Center. One of the network
talking heads was interviewing a spokesman for the New York Police
Department, and asked a question that made the fellow look temporarily
uncomfortable.

"What about profiling?" she asked. "Some of our callers have expressed
concerns about profiling" of Arab-Americans

"We're going to do whatever's necessary to protect America," the crewcut
fellow replied. "But we'll stay within the letter of the law."

An adequate response as far as it goes -- and I know how hard it can be to
"think on your feet" in those circumstances.

But a missed opportunity to say, "I've instructed all my men, and I want to
say to the American people here tonight, that there are plenty of good,
loyal Americans who are of Middle Eastern origin, or Arab extraction. I
hope this country learned from our mistake of 1942, when they wrongly
rounded up and interned all the Japanese immigrants, and even American
citizens of Japanese extraction.

"But having said that, let's suppose you're about to board a
transcontinental flight, and I'm the security officer assigned to spend a
few minutes interviewing your fellow passengers, and there are three people
who have attracted my attention. One of these passengers is an Asian woman
from Texas. One is a black man from Boston. And the third passenger who's
caught my interest is a visitor to our country from Saudi Arabia, whose
name is Mahmood.

"Do you think maybe I ought to spend most of my time chatting with Mr. Mahmood?

"If you do, you've just endorsed 'profiling.' You see, 'profiling' became
an issue in this country because of the allegation that police are more
likely to stop and question young black men when they see them somewhere
where they appear to be out of place, on the theory that young black men
commit more than their fair share of crimes. The problem is, young black
men DO commit more than their fair share of crimes. And like it or not, Mr.
Mahmood IS more likely to be a hijacker."

Political correctness costs lives, and lies and euphemisms and double-talk
invite confusion and mistakes. If our limited security resources are
expended tossing the luggage of every black and Asian and Scandinavian air
passenger in a relentless search for deadly TOENAIL CLIPPERS and plastic
picnic knives, those resources will not be available to run a better
background check on a young minimum-wage contract janitor named Fatima
Mujahadeen, who's going to be alone in your plane later tonight, vacuuming
the seat cushions.

Have "things in America really changed"? Let's suppose a common-sense
employer actually summons up the nerve tomorrow to tell an applicant for a
job on the 80th floor of the Sears Tower in Chicago, "Miss, I'm not going
to give you this job because you're in a wheelchair, and in an emergency
like Sept. 11 we'd all have to leave via the stairwells, and you wouldn't
make it. Not only that, OTHER employees here might lose their lives coming
back to help you, as happened at the World Trade Center."

Do you think the courts and the federal anti-discrimination agencies would
tell that aggrieved job-seeker, "He's right. Things in America changed last
week, and we're now gone back to operating on a much older principle,
called 'common sense' "?

Or would that straight-talking interviewer lose his job as the company
still got dragged through the courts in another million-dollar Americans
with Disabilities Act lawsuit, as though nothing had changed at all, and
we're still willing to sink giggling into the sea, counting angels on the
heads of pins and finding new grievances and liabilities everywhere, even
as our enemies plot their next attack?

In a nation where there's a systematic campaign afoot to demonize the
ownership of firearms or skill with firearms, where does anyone imagine
we're going to find the skilled marksmen needed to fight a war for our very
survival?

I've been accused of sounding somewhat bellicose of late. In fact, I hate
war. I don't want war. I've long said we should stop meddling in a hundred
global "hot spots" from Bosnia to the Horn of Africa where we can
accomplish little but to make ourselves new enemies.

But, that said, I also agree with the late Barry Goldwater that -- when
you've done all you can to avoid war and war has been thrust upon you
anyway -- the thing to do is to fight to win, to kill as many of the enemy
as you can as fast as you can, no matter how many mewling Johnson-McNamara
gradual-escalation liberals ridicule you for "viewing the world through a
rose-colored bombsight" (an actual campaign slogan of that renowned 1964
"pacifist," Lyndon Baines Johnson).

Are we serious about winning a "war against terrorism"? President Bush
could begin by declaring an end tomorrow to the fruitless and expensive
"War on Drugs." If heroin and morphine were legal, their prices would
quickly drop by more than 90 percent. What do you suppose that would do the
profitability of the Afghan poppy crop?

Think of how many police and intelligence resources could be immediately
diverted to tracking terrorists.

And how would that compare to the effects of the administration's current
"War on Drugs" hysteria?

"Enslave your girls and women, harbor anti- U.S. terrorists, destroy every
vestige of civilization in your homeland, and the Bush administration will
embrace you," wrote columnist Robert Scheer in a May 22 Los Angeles Times
essay headlined "Bush's Faustian deal with the Taliban."

"All that matters is that you line up as an ally in the drug war, the only
international cause that this nation still takes seriously. That's the
message sent with the recent gift of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of
Afghanistan, the most virulent anti-American violators of human rights in
the world today.

"The gift ... makes the U.S. the main sponsor of the Taliban and rewards
that 'rogue regime' for declaring that opium growing is against the will of
God," Mr. Scheer continued.

"Never mind that Osama bin Laden still operates the leading anti-American
terror operation from his base in Afghanistan, from which, among other
crimes, he launched two bloody attacks on American embassies in Africa in
1998," Mr. Scheer reminded his readers a mere four months ago.

I hope I'm wrong. But I worry our adversaries may have it right -- America
is no longer virile enough, America no longer has the resolve, America has
become too silly and "mommified" and caught up in Politically Correct fibs
and fripperies to win a protracted struggle for our very existence against
a force as elemental as the Islamic fundamentalist drive to destroy
capitalism, western values ... the modern world as we know it.