If you click here and look at a video Kathryn Lopez posted of one of the casualties of the Boston Marathon bombing being comforted, you’ll have your heart both broken and uplifted.
It is of a Marine who lost both legs telling a woman who suffered similar injuries in Boston that it isn’t the end of the world and that “so many opportunities are going to come your way.”
The wounds suffered in Boston were similar to those inflicted on Middle Eastern battlefields. Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal writes about the maiming intention of the bombers:
The main intention, certainly the main effect, was to send a thousand tiny metal knives flying at supersonic speeds in every direction from the blast. That is what Palestinian "engineers" do when they add nails and ball bearings—and, sometimes, rat poison—to the vests of suicide bombers. These are maiming operations, in their own class of cruel. It's what the Tsarnaevs had been up to for many weeks, perhaps months, probably without misgivings or second thoughts.
I wanted to post these two items because I am a little sheepish about moving from the bombing to the issues it raises. I don’t want to lose sight of what Graham Greene would call the human factor. But we have to consider not only what happened but why it happened and what must be done to protest us.
We must also confront the willful blindness of our government, which refuses to hear, see, or speak the truth when confronted with acts such as this one. Why are our government and the mainstream media so unwilling to look at reality in the face?
Jeffrey Lord explains in an American Spectator piece headlined “Jihad Blows Up Liberal Utopia.” Lord writes:
Jihad has blown up The Liberal Utopia.
The visionary liberal land of political and social perfection.
President Obama is not happy — and he isn’t alone.
You know the place.
• The Liberal Utopia is a land where gun background checks prevent mass murder.
• The Liberal Utopia is a land where Islamic fundamentalists have changed their perception of America because the President travels to Muslim nations to give lovely speeches, believes that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere is a wonderful sign of an Arab Spring, and refuses to use the word “terrorist” whether his administration is investigating Ft. Hood, Boston, or Benghazi.
• The Liberal Utopia is a land where a 2009 presidential video proclaiming a “new beginning” in American relations with Iran will halt the effort to build a nuclear bomb.
• The Liberal Utopia is a land where the good intentions of Social Security will never bankrupt the Social Security Trust Fund.
We see the collapse of the liberal utopian dream all around us. The coming train wreck, to borrow a Democratic senator’s description, that is ObamaCare is part of that collapse. Unfortunately, it is collapsing on ordinary people. Do you think President Obama or any member of his family will be affected by the colossal failure of ObamaCare? No, that kind of suffering is for the little people, as Leona Helmsley might have put it.
I commend to you a piece in the U.K. online magazine Standpoint on “The Dawn of Obamageddon.” It’s a long piece and to my mind it raises two important questions: can an eighteenth century document known as the Constitution save us, and can we save that eighteenth century document? A brief lull in the power of checks and balances gave us ObamaCare.