TWENTY YEARS AGO, THE TOWERS FELL. We said “never forget.” Well, we haven’t forgotten the heroism of people like Rick Rescorla, the Flight 93 passengers, the firefighters who charged up the WTC stairs, or the volunteers who set up the American Dunkirk evacuation of lower Manhattan by boat.

But we have forgotten the criminal negligence of our political leaders and intelligence services that got us to that point. We should have purged the incompetents then. Now they’re running the show. The country is still sound, but the people in charge of it have only gotten worse.

Those are my not very encouraging thoughts, twenty years later.