9/11 Five Years Later

I think this article is saying pretty much how it is.

President Bush and first lady Laura Bush yesterday descended somberly into the rubble-strewn chasm of ground zero to set afloat two wreaths of red, white and blue flowers in reflecting pools at the site where Islamic terrorists killed 2,749 persons five years ago today.
The president and his wife, holding hands, walked down a long ramp into the hole where the World Trade Center towers once stood.
On a gray afternoon threatening rain, they stepped through a phalanx of soldiers holding U.S. flags, accompanied by former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Gov. George E. Pataki and current Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
The Bushes stood silently for more than a minute, watching as the wreaths floated into the center of the water-filled wooden boxes, where families of those killed on September 11 will lay roses today.

And

Democrats have charged that the president is politicizing the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, but Mr. Bush plans only silent observances today.

You'd think the Dems could show just a touch of dignity and be silent on the President's observances.

9/11 is clearly the newest of dates that no one in the Administration can observe without screeches of "politics" from the left.

Too bad this horrible event has come to be such a divisive icon for the country.

Christopher Hitchens points to another disturbing observance that will likely be coming to the political stage.

The time for commemoration lies very far in the future. War memorials are erected when the war is won. At the moment, anyone who insists on the primacy of September 11, 2001, is very likely to be accused--not just overseas but in this country also--of making or at least of implying a "partisan" point. I debate with the "antiwar" types almost every day, either in print or on the air or on the podium, and I can tell you that they have been "war-weary" ever since the sun first set on the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and on the noble debris of United Airlines 93. These clever critics are waiting, some of them gleefully, for the moment that is not far off: the moment when the number of American casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq will match or exceed the number of civilians of all nationalities who were slaughtered five years ago today. But to the bored, cynical neutrals, it also comes naturally to say that it is "the war" that has taken, and is taking, the lives of tens of thousands of other civilians. In other words, homicidal nihilism is produced only by the resistance to it! If these hacks were honest, and conceded the simple truth that it is the forces of the Taliban and of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia that are conducting a Saturnalia of murder and destruction, they would have to hide their faces and admit that they were not "antiwar" at all.

His peice is an interesting pointer on the public and the media's stance on the war on terror.

UPDATE:
Catch WizBang's blog topic. It's an especially good piece with volumes of links.