But given what day it is, I feel it's appropriate to bring up a very good point from Instapundit...

THE PRESS WANTS TO SHOW BODIES from Katrina. It didn't want to show bodies, or jumpers, on 9/11, for fear that doing so would inflame the public.

I can only conclude that this time around, the press thinks it's a good thing to inflame the public. What could the difference be?

...and Ed Driscoll...

I wonder if next time Hugh Hewitt has someone high up at CNN on his show, he could ask them, "In light of your decision to show the bodies of Katrina victims, do you think it was a mistake for networks like yourself to hide the images of victims of Saddam Hussein or 9/11? Really? Well, why didn't you at least show the latter on its fourth anniversary?"

Which is tomorrow, incidentally.

...and from the news media itself.

"The question is, are we informing or titillating and causing unnecessary grief?" ABC News chief David Westin told the New York Times just days after the Sept. 11 attack. Explaining why his network decided not to show any pictures of people leaping to their deaths at the World Trade Center, he said, "Our responsibility is to inform the American public of what's going on, and, in going the next step, is it necessary to show people plunging to their death?"

I have a truism on my old site that reads, "If you want to make enemies, try to change something." I thought of that the other day while mulling over this topic.

"This topic" being why some people love President Bush to death and some are favoring assassination about now. Clinton, Reagan, Bush Sr.; I don't remember any of them provoking such utter ire in some and such high praise in others.

But I think it finally clicked with me what's going on here. Until the Bush administration, the proper course of action in response to potential threats was to observe, get approval from others, and only strike after being struck first (and in a less severe manner). And that made people happy, because it was nicely middle-line. Yes, some considered such actions ineffectual and would have preferred we send in the troops immediately, and others considered such actions barbaric and would have preferred we ignored the threats like annoying but harmless flies. But this was enough to sort of satisfy the vast majority of Americans, neither here nor there, a acceptable compromise. So that's what we did.

Then four years ago, the World Trade Center fell.

Bush drew a conclusion from that day, and you can argue on and on about whether it was right or wrong and by how much, but he had one, and it stuck. And the result was that our entire system of handling threats was thrown out the window and replaced. The change was so drastic and so new that the new system -- eliminating regimes known to be hostile to the US and their own citizens BEFORE they strike, and replacing them with democratic governments -- has been referred to as the Bush Doctrine.

This brought huge applause from one group of Americans... and outrage from the other. By introducing the Doctrine, Bush had decided not to bother with compromise. If he had compromised, everyone would have been sort of satisfied (assuming we didn't get hit again, though he assumed we would), but this way, Americans suddenly found themselves taking sides, on a level not seen in ages. And as time progressed, those sides saw their feelings for Bush, be they love or hate, grow and ferment.

Mark Steyn (on the conservative side of the fence) recently said that "the war is being won [...] but at home the war about the war is being lost." And it is a war. When two sides of that size disagree to the point where compromise is seen as unacceptable by one or both sides, the result is war, whether of bullets and bodies or of ideas and minds.

Four years ago, Bush decided to change something. And a good portion of America will never forgive him for it.

You know, at my last fulltime job (yeah, THAT one), "deadlines" didn't exist. The boss might pretend they did for a project, but then we'd get bogged down in other stuff, and it would just roll on by; I'm not sure he even remembered at that point the first project existed. I quit partially because of that lazy attitude toward getting stuff done.

Be careful what you wish for. I jumped into a Quality Assurance department that needed a large list of test cases completed on the latest version of the software, by Monday. The beginning of Monday, mind you, not the end of Friday. That's important. See, we weren't done Friday at 6pm which is when we normally check out, so we kept right on going (though Allen, the department head, ordered pizza as a reward for the overtime).

At 9pm, we still weren't done. So what did we do? Checked out, then worked a full day SATURDAY. Again, Allen sprung for food for the entire department, and gave us Monday off as soon as we finally finished, but this is definitely a new concept for me. I'm just glad I get paid by the hour (much of the department is on salary, though they get benefits as well).