1 I don't think this is a time for you to be angry. Your focus is in the right place: your pregnancy. And you have not forgotten 9/11. Otherwise you wouldn't have posted this.

Your focus will be on your daughter for many years to come. This doesn't necessarily mean you've shut off Nelson's laser beam. On the contrary, you're training a member of the next generation of laser riflemen. Even if your daughter never becomes a gun enthusiast, she must be armed with the greatest weapons of the West: its ideas.

She must be loyal to the ideas that our government has betrayed (emphasis mine):

The State Department’s new “democratic” constitutions for Afghanistan and Iraq are a disgrace: establishing Islam as the state religion and elevating sharia as fundamental law. That is not exporting our values; it is appeasing Islamism. It is putting on display our lack of will to fight for our principles, which only emboldens our enemies.

Can you imagine if the Axis got new constitutions like the Afghan and Iraqi constitutions after World War II? What happened to the America that won that war?

Recall, for example, the spectacle of the Christian prosecuted for apostasy a couple of years back by the post-Taliban, U.S.-backed Afghan government. He had to be whisked out of the country because it’s not safe for an ex-Muslim religious convert in the new Afghanistan. It’s not safe for non-Muslims, period.

It's not even safe for ex-Muslims in this country:

Several years ago, she converted from Islam to Christianity ... After her father threatened to kill her for apostasy, a crime under Islamic Sharia law, Rifqa hitchhiked to the bus station and fled to Florida [from Ohio].

This is the America your daughter will be born into. A country where 9/11 was planned (emphasis mine):

The 9/11 attacks were extensively planned, over long periods of time, in, among other places, Berlin, Madrid, San Diego, Florida, Oklahoma, and Connecticut. Clearly, thriving democracy in those places provided no security.

A country that sacrifices for its enemies (emphasis mine):

And what we had our hands full with in Iraq and Afghanistan was nation-building. Quite apart from the inherent futility of trying to democratize fundamentalist Muslim countries, our efforts in those two places were doomed if we failed to address Iran’s promotion of terrorism and its intolerable nuclear threat. What has happened to Iraq has happened because we lacked the will to deal with Iran. We left unaccomplished the mission that was vital to our national interests while laboring exhaustively to create Islamic democracies that are either hostile or useless to us.

A country that imports sharia, the antithesis of your ideas, into places like Ohio. Ohio!

So, yes, you have good reasons to be unsettled.

None of that is primarily the fault of - as Nelson put it - "Chomsky and the BBC, Old Europe and ANSWER, second and third rate entertainers and academics". I'm not mad at them. I laugh at them. I even laugh at the first-rate entertainers and academics who venture out of their fields to support the latest Leftist fashion. They're just a sideshow, a distraction. Let's focus on our real external and internal enemies.

I agree with Andrew McCarthy's approach toward the former:

We can’t stop Muslim countries from being Islamist. That is their choice. It should be no concern of ours who rules them as long as they do not threaten American interests. When they inevitably do threaten us, or allow their territories to be launch pads for terrorists, we should smash them. But the price of defending our nation cannot be spending years — at a cost of precious lives and hundreds of billions of dollars — in a vain attempt to give people who despise us a way of life they don’t want.

The question for me is, what do we do about the latter, about our enemies within? Can we simply keep voting them out of office? Instead of worrying about freedom for Islamists abroad, we should worry about the future of freedom here. As McCarthy suggested,

The surge we need is at home: to roll back Islamism’s infiltration of our schools, our financial system, our law, and our government. In addition to not being universal, the “values of the human spirit” are not immortal. If we don’t defend them in the West, they will die.

But there are more threats than terrorism. Recently we have seen a homegrown surge against socialism in the form of tea parties - of Rightist protests against Dr. gOvernment. Our citizen-troops may win this battle. But can they keep winning? Or will they - we - eventually be outnumbered by those who vote for 'free' handouts? Will we have to retreat to our gulch?

PS: Nelson, wherever you are, I miss you.

2 I think my anger is spread thin because I'm just so tired.  TIRED.  Tired of the constant deployments and TDYS, tired of fighting  at home and keeping up the face for those deployed to keep their morale up, tired of the constant attacks and name-calling, tired of seeming to take two steps back for every step forward, and tired because it seems like we're still on the brink in so many places. 

I'm not ready to give up, I'm just tired.  I need a rest, and there doesn't seem to be one in sight.  I'm still angry, and I think that's why I refuse to give up, but it's hard to focus that anger when you're overwhelmed. 

On the other hand, I've also ever been one to to smack myself about whining when seeing someone else's situation.  How can I complain about being tired when I think about what Britain went through in WWII?  My children and I don't have to retreat into the metro stations to avoid bombing raids every night.  We can eat whatever we want - my grandmother had shortages.

How can I complain about being tired when there were members of my husband's family who went through Stalingrad?  My fatigue is NOTHING compared to that. 

I'm lucky, and I have no right to slow down.  But sometimes I do.  And that's why my anger is spread thin.  But days like today are what cause me to regroup and regather and remember what we're fighting for. 

I'm tired, but I have not forgotten.