by JAMES TARANTO AND IRA STOLL
Friday, September 14, 2001 2:08 P.M. EDT

Editor's note: Best of the Web will publish over the weekend, assuming there is news to report--and it's hard to imagine there won't be.

America at Its Worst
Like most of our fellow Americans, we have been inspired by the show of national unity we've seen in the wake of Tuesday's atrocity. The old adage that "politics stops at the water's edge" is borne out by the sight of Sen. Hillary Clinton pledging her full support to President Bush, by the news that Bush provided Al Gore with an Air Force plane so he could return from Europe to attend today's prayer service at Washington's National Cathedral, by the sight of hundreds of members of Congress, of both parties, singing "God Bless America" on Tuesday.

But there have been exceptions to this rule, and while we don't want to dwell on them, we feel obliged to point them out. A few Democrats have been sniping at the commander in chief. "It's not a question of what he's saying. The content is fine. But the blandness with which it is delivered has caused considerable reaction," Rep. Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, tells the Boston Herald. Fellow Bay State Democrat Rep. Martin Meehan is still griping about Bush's failure to return to Washington immediately on Tuesday: "I don't buy the notion Air Force One was a target," he tells the Herald. "That's just PR. That's just spin."

College campuses are always a haven for anti-American sentiment; we remember hearing that during the Gulf War, Cornell prohibited its students from flying the American flag in their dorm-room windows. Even the destruction of the twin towers doesn't seem to have improved attitudes in the ivory towers. Up in Berkeley, the Daily Californian reports that at a candlelight vigil Tuesday night, "the crowd applauded when one speaker blasted the United States for originating state-sponsored terrorism." A letter to the editor from one Clare Fehsenfeld in the Badger-Herald, a student paper at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, asserts, "The strikes at the Pentagon (our center of war) and the World Trade Center (a monetary focal point) are telling. We had neither our democracy nor our freedom challenged, but rather our interventional [sic] and often coercive use of military and economic capital."

Other comments have been nothing short of obscene. Filmmaker Michael Moore explains on his Web site that his first reaction was to think the terrorists should have killed more Republicans:

Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California--these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!

Why kill them? Why kill anyone?

Andrew Sullivan quotes Jerry Falwell as telling his fellow televangelist Pat Robertson: "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way--all of them who have tried to secularize America--I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' " Robertson's reply: "Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted their agenda at the highest levels of our government." The mirror image of the Falwell-Robertson calumny is a press release from the Madison, Wis.-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, which declares: "The terrorist disasters of September 11 may well have been the ultimate 'faith-based initiative.' "

It is, of course, one of the glories of America that our Constitution gives us all the right to express ourselves freely. We would not dream of calling on the government to censor any of the smug, ignorant and hateful sentiments we've enumerated here. But there are times when a little self-censorship is in order, and this is one of them.

Security? What Security?
The planes that destroyed the twin towers on Tuesday both left Boston's Logan Airport. Two weeks earlier, a 23-year-old freelance journalist testing the airport's security for a news article succeeded in getting his cell phone past three checkpoints uninspected. (Cell phones are normally supposed to go through the X-ray machines.) When the reporter, Ben Hartman, called the Federal Aviation Administration for comment on the breaches, an agent thanked him for his help and assured him that she would take care of the problem immediately. "Apparently, she didn't do it fast enough," he writes.

The security company guarding checkpoints at two other airports where the terrorists hijacked planes, Dulles and Newark, "was fined $1 million last year in connection with the hiring of employees with criminal records and inadequate training," the New York Post reports. The president of Argenbright Security says the company has since improved its procedures.

The Night Before
The Miami Herald reports that in Florida, a tip "took investigators to Daytona Beach, where three men who appeared to be Middle Eastern criticized the United States hours before the attack in a conversation with fellow patrons at a sports and nude bar, bragging, 'America is going to see blood, just wait until tomorrow' ":

Pink Pony owner John Kap said he dismissed the Monday-night incident as beery bar banter--until he heard the news about the jet attacks the following morning.

FBI officials wouldn't comment on the tip, but Kap said he turned over individual credit card receipts for each of the men, their driver license information, a Koran the men left behind and a business card one of the men slipped to a woman working at the bar.

Kap refused to name the men or indicate where they lived, but he said the FBI told him the information "was one of the most substantial leads they had."

Kap said the three men had stopped by the bar--a sports bar and adjoining strip club--about 10 p.m. They sat at the bar, racking up tabs of $40 to $80, and slipped back to watch the dancers writhing on the poles.

Learn to Fly
Several of the aviation schools where the suspected hijackers reportedly practiced flying have web sites: Huffman Aviation in Venice ("If you have ever considered becoming a pilot, click on the Be A Pilot Logo for a discount coupon on your first lesson!") and Palm Beach Flight Training in Lantana, Fla. ("Flight instruction tailored to each student.") On Wednesday we linked to the site for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

The Role of Israel
Opposite views from American Jewish conservative commentators on the role of Israel in the targeting of America. David Gelernter says, "No doubt internal Arab politics had something to do with the massacres, but in the end there is one reason why the United States is the target: We are the only nation in the world with the decency and heart to stand up for Israel." Norman Podhoretz says (last letter), "Even if there were no Israel, these people would still hate us as an embodiment of everything they consider unholy. . . . The disappearance of Israel would do nothing to prevent such attacks."

Like the Nazis
We're normally wary of Nazi comparisons--for that matter, we're normally wary of Taliban comparisons--but it's hard to disagree with Benjamin Netanyahu. In the Jerusalem Post the former Israeli prime minister writes:

The only way to fully understand this is to recall the effects of another hate-filled ideology, Nazism, which also started as a local movement, and which in just a few years became a world force. Nazism 60 years ago, like fundamentalist Islam today, was also initially directed only against Jews and other local minorities. It quickly became clear, however, that its passionate hatred was directed against our entire civilization.

Then as now, the democracies were late in appreciating the horrendous implications to our societies of a fanatic ideology bent on world domination and lacking any inhibition about destroying lives in the process.

Remembering Barbara Olson
The first identified victim of Tuesday's attack we heard about turned out to be someone we knew: Barbara Olson--author, lawyer and wife of Solicitor General Ted Olson--who was a passenger on the plane that hit the Pentagon. National Review Online has a brief editorial and two other articles remembering Olson.

Lucianne Goldberg writes: "We have never known anyone quite like her, this silky, brilliant, incandescently lovely, ferocious, charming woman. Barbara Olson, a heroine in life, a heroine in death, was murdered Tuesday morning in the blazing crash of a hijacked airliner exploding against the side of the Pentagon. The last words phoned to her beloved husband, Ted, were, 'What do I tell the pilot to do?' How like her to demand to take charge, to make things better, to set things right. That was the way she lived."

Michael Ledeen writes: "Barbara Olson was a life force, a protean woman who lived life as it is supposed to be lived, celebrating the good times to the full, enduring its worst moments with grim resolve, supporting her friends and allies at all times, taking the fight to her enemies with joyful enthusiasm. She had one of the quickest and finest minds in Washington. Married to one of the greatest attorneys of our time, she was the equal of anyone in legal and political debate. But above all, she was our Braveheart, leading us into battle with the cry of 'Freeeeeedom,' carrying the flag of proud independence."

Spam Never Stops
The good news is that the Internet has been running all week with remarkably little problem. The bad news is that the jerks who send "spam"--those ads for pornography, baldness cures, investment scams and so forth that clutter all our e-mailboxes--don't have the good taste to suspend their activities during a time of crisis. Indeed, as Wired magazine reports, "Before the rubble had even stopped smoking . . ., spammers were trying to capitalize on the tragedy."

Wired quotes one e-mail that went out two hours after the initial attack: "No terrorists here! Join our porn site, turn off the TV, quit watching the crap happening in the states and join our free site!" Other e-mails, seeking to dupe well-intentioned recipients, "invoke the name of the Red Cross and send surfers to a private pay site." One good sign, though:

One spam directed recipients to a suspicious-sounding URL on a free Web server known among the anti-spam community for harboring spammers. The Web server pulled the site, which is an indication that even a server friendly to spammers has limitations in terms of propriety.

Hitting Bottom
Our colleague Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page (and author of a compelling first-person account of Tuesday's atrocity that appeared in Wednesday's Journal), begins his new column, "Wonder Land," today, with a commentary on the state of American culture at the outset of war:

This discomfiting tension between creative bursts and common cultural mediocrity has grown greater the past 20 years or so, such that a stream of commentators, perhaps starting with Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind," have begun to ask: Where's the bottom?

I'll tell you where the bottom is. We just hit it. It's lying 10 stories high, as rubble, in the streets where the World Trade Center once was. I am not going to suggest that this event is somehow going to forestall the forces driving our culture lower. The causes of that have deeper roots now than mere bad taste. And it may well be that in many ways, what happened Tuesday "changed everything." But what we have most wonderfully learned since Tuesday about America is how much has not changed.

Here's one small victory for good taste, though: Wired reports that a hip-hop group called the Coup is withdrawing the original cover for its forthcoming album, "Party Music." Here's Wired's description of the cover, which was designed months ago:

Against a backdrop of morning skies, the towers of the World Trade Center stand engulfed in flame from the impact of twin explosions. Clouds of smoke spew from the upper stories, all but obscuring the tip of what was once the epicenter of the New York City skyline.

If it weren't for the super-imposed images of the Oakland, California, hip-hop duo known as The Coup, the scene could pass for a remarkably precise replica of the horrific tragedy that befell New York City on Tuesday morning.

You can see the cover here.

Home News
Thanks to all the readers who've inquired about our safety. The Wall Street Journal, which publishes this Web site, is located at One World Financial Center, which is catercorner from where the twin towers stood. All of our colleagues on the Journal's editorial page are safe and accounted for, and our parent company, Dow Jones & Co., has had no reports of death or serious injury to any employees. Our building, of course, has been evacuated, and the Journal is being published out of temporary headquarters in New Jersey. Today's Washington Post and New York Times (link requires registration) both have accounts of how the Journal managed to publish Wednesday's paper.

(Thanks to James Miller, Patrick Charles, Eric Anondson, Eric Vetter, Phil McDade, Richard Halpern, Howard Fienberg and Damian Bennett. If you have a tip, e-mail us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)