[Editor's Note: This first e-mail is from my brother-in-law:]

Rich,

By coincidence I am reading The Second World War, by John Keegan. It is a very good book by a very good historian.

When Churchill heard about Pearl Harbor, he did not despair. In fact, he was instantly certain of victory. "So we have won after all," he said. "Yes, after Dunkirk; after the fall of France; after the horrible episode of Oran; after the threat of invasion, when, apart from the Air and the Navy, we wer an almost unarmed people; after the deadly struggle of the U-boat war - the first Battle of the Atlantic, gained by a hand's breadth; after seventeen months of lonely fighting and nineteen months of my responsibility in dire stress. We had won the war."

It made me wonder if, after 11 September, the Israelis may now share a sense that they are no longer alone in the struggle against the enemies of modernism.

JC

[Editor's Note: I received this numerous times over the past day-and-a-half; but Margaret's e-mail was the first. Ms. Parker is the former Finance Director of the Republican National Committee.]

A colleague suggested that as an alternative approach we might tell the Taliban that they either give us bin Laden or we gather up all their women and send them to college.
That should do it.

Margaret Parker

[Editor's Note: This is the full section of the quote from Professor Turley's piece in the National Review Online.

We often forget the challenges that we have overcome and the enemies that we have faced. More importantly, in the face of such danger, we can forget about our unique capability to deal with such threats. The Madisonian democracy was designed to handle bad, not good, weather. The Framers even inserted provisions into the Constitution to deal with extreme emergencies, including such drastic measures as the suspension of habeas corpus. We have a constitutional and legal system that can adjust to new threats better than any system on Earth. The idea that we are rigid and unprepared is to ignore the greatest strength of the Madisonian democracy: Its ability to adapt quickly and decisively in the face of national crisis.

Jonathon Turley