“Admittedly the challenges are still in rinky-dink places, but that’s only because they’ve just gotten started. Although still based in these hick places, their targets are already downtown New York and DC. If the problems on the periphery were going to stay there, then fine. But they’re not. September 11 should have shown us they are not — because of the weaknesses outlined in the paragraph above. What’s there to keep them out?

“The West is extraordinarily vulnerable and the fight can move from the periphery to the center, I think, with shocking rapidity. What really scares me is what people in Denver are talking about; how the media is treating it like an entertainment extravaganza. That’s what is truly frightening. Not what we see out the window, but what we see in the mirror.”

Precisely. We are currently, essentially, in the nascent stages of all this, an absolutely critical stage that requires clarity of vision, a stalwart gaze, informed deliberations and decisiveness shorn of excess. Yet the rationalizations, the ambivalence, the tergiversations, etc. on display around around the web, treating it all as if it’s little more than one more factor within an elect-Obama calculus, is rather stunning, which is not to say surprising.