Delusions of Adequacy

David Limbaugh makes a good point in today's column on why the President should not apologize for 9/11.

If President Bush is responsible for some unannounced, elaborate murderous plot by America's enemies, then our government is responsible for all crimes, not the criminals who commit them (which, by the way, is not such a farfetched concept among the liberal elite).

Government culpability for common crimes may not really be a common liberal position (if it is, it's certainly never barred a liberal from insisting that the answer to societal problems is more government), but Limbaugh has a point here; for the President to accept blame for something no sane person would claim to have been able to predict in the summer of '01 would be another nail in the coffin of the clearly obsolete concept that when a homicidal fanatic commits mass murder, it's the homicidal fanatic's fault.

But of course, the calls for Bush to apologize have nothing to do with assuaging survivors' grief, and still less with moral courage.

An unwarranted apology wouldn't help the victims' families. But it would help the perpetrators by shifting blame away from them. And it would help President Bush's political opponents -- at least they think it would -- who long for that one self-damning soundbite with which to hang the president.

What those who are calling for an apology want is a soundbite to run in Kerry's campaign ads. They're playing to the people in this Cox and Forkum cartoon.