Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Glenn doesn’t really share my bitter cynicism about things.

19 YEARS AGO TODAY, WE SAID “NEVER FORGET,” BUT WE MOSTLY HAVE. Maybe that’s okay, in a way. As hardly anyone has noticed, Trump’s mideast peace deals have pulled the teeth of Islamic terror — without funding from the Saudis and the other rich Arab states, these “grassroots” terror movements miraculously disappear, just as the “people-based” communist revolutions vanished as soon as the Soviet Union went belly-up and quit funding them. And also, with fracking, there’s not as much Arab money lying around to begin with.

No one who was alive and aware that day will forget it, but my law students are already mostly young enough not to really remember it.

But look at it this way: The Bush presidency was basically all about reacting to 9/11. The Obama presidency was mostly about reacting to the Bush presidency’s reaction to 9/11. Trump’s presidency has been about putting the United States in a position where things like that won’t happen. I’ll take it.

He usually provides a link to his 9/11/01 posts but for some reason didn’t this year, and the archive link redirects to the main Instapundit page. But from my own bitterly cynical point of view, I can only ask: at this late stage of the game, why bother?

Meanwhile, my good friend and esteemed fellow OG warblogger Bill Quick—DEFINITELY unsurprisingly for those of us who know him well—does indeed share my bitter cynicism. But even a Pro-level cynic like Bill can’t quite eclipse my own weapons-grade Bitter Cynicissitude, I don’t think.

We have, of course, forgotten.

It is natural that we would. Two of the current crop of young American heroes, Nick Sandmann and Kyle Rittenhouse, have no living recollection of the Muslim jihad attack on America that occurred on September 11, 2001, two years before either were born.

We move on. Time heals all wounds. Blah, blah, blah.

It is revealing that, from my point of view, Islam appears to have won that encounter. Americans of today seem far more worried about being perceived as “Islamophobic,” than they are about the ongoing wave of atrocities being committed around the world in Islam’s name.

Of course, we have become a soft and decadent people. One of the reasons we have not unconditionally won a war since WWII is that we don’t have the fiber to wage a war to victory. Hell, we even get the vapors if some white couple dares stand on their own property while bearing arms against a rioting mob invading their neighborhood.

We want to be “nice.” But what we end up being, over and over again, is dead.

I haven’t forgotten, nor have I forgiven. But I am part of a dwindling breed. Young heroic men like Kyle Rittenhouse and Nicholas Sandmann give me hope for the future. But I can’t escape the ominous feeling that even they may only be the last gasp of a dying past.

He’s right, of course, about all of it. Sadly, depressingly, that would include that last sentence.

But right now, what it’s all putting me in mind of is that, on 9/14/01, I registered the Cold Fury domain name. Over the next couple of days, I built the site from scratch—I had only just discovered this whole newfangled blogging thang, so the original site was constructed using Adobe GoLive and BBEdit—and on the 16th I put up the first few posts. Before too long, I would discover the old blogging software Grey Matter, using that for a while before switching over to Moveable Type, then finally moving on to WordPress soon after it came out.

And that, in turn, means that once again I’ll soon have to remind myself to renew the domain name. Usually I forget, leading to a stupid outage; the seemingly perennial personal-cash-flow blockage of the last several years means that renewing in advance, or setting things up for auto-renewal (such luxury!), just ain’t in the cards, alas. But I SWEAR I’ma get it done on time this year, dammit. I SWEAR it.

And that, in turn, puts me in mind of the necessity to begin the Herculean task of trying at last to untangle the malicious Russkie code planted in last year’s über-hack from the voluminous CF archive database, which I’ll be starting on forthwith, Lord help me. Maybe I’ll also see if I can dig up a screenshot from those halcyon early CF days and post that, too. No promises on that one, though. Heck, I don’t even know that I have one at all, much where I’d go a-hunting for such an elusive snipe.

A side yarn I’ve spun before here, while we’re on the subject of ancient history and bygone days: the Cold Fury name originally came to be because of my immediate realization that, although the whole country came together in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, that apparent unity was illusory, and would be short-lived. I knew that the Left would be unable to restrain its still-developing but already quite powerful America-Hate muscle from spasming involuntarily. Its Pavlovian instinct to lay the world’s every ill, every evil, and every injustice at America’s feet would soon find its too-predictable expression via the latest Islamic act of barbarism and savagery against the hated Western infidel. That sure and certain knowledge sparked a…well, yes, a Cold Fury in me that still scorches the soul even now.

In my bitterly cynical mind, I gave the dirty bastards no more than a week before they’d bare the bloody fangs and revert to their true nature. Two, at the outside.

In the event, I had been too magnanimous: as I recollect, it was no more than two-three days before the first establishment-media op-ed appeared, penned by some self-loathing shitlib bint or other who superciliously opined that, what with its many decades of Oppressing Innocent Brown People the world over—most especially the long-tormented Middle East, whose only sin was being situated atop all that accursed oil, placed by heartless Fate between Black Gold and AMERICAN GREED™—America had only itself to blame for the latest shattering, calamitous assault.

The rubble and carcinogenic dust hadn’t yet settled; the deadly fires still burned in Lower Manhattan. Nobody even knew yet how many innocent souls, from all over the world, had been murdered. An entire nation had been brought to a standstill, holding its breath while it waited for information about the calamity.

Yet here the loathsome brigands came nonetheless, bringing the routine Despicable-Left shit to be smeared all over tear-streaked American faces, ground into grieving American hearts.

They eagerly made an obscene, gruesome mockery of all human compassion, forbearance, and decency in an orgy of mindless hatred. And now, almost two decades later? If anything, they’re even worse than they were back then. Now as then, their only thought is to denigrate, to defile, to destroy. But today the thought has, by orders of magnitude, grown more intense. Their ambition has metastasized, their determination hardened far beyond the ability of mere words to break, soften, or deflect.

As Glenn has long said: Anti-war? Nope. On the other side.