Another brilliant and coruscating piece by Victor Davis Hanson on the moral bankruptcy represented by Senator John Kerry and all those on his side of the argument. As Hanson makes clear, if there had been any doubt about Kerry's unwillingness to face up to current, changed realities, it was surely dispelled altogether by his remark in the third presidential debate that he would treat Islamic terrorism as nothing more than 'a nuisance', like prostitution. I suppose this is all of a piece with his earlier assurance that he would conduct a 'more sensitive' war on terror. In other words, he is the standard-bearer for the September 10 party, He has learned and understood nothing. For 30 years, the west was governed by this view of the world. For 30 years, Americans were steadily murdered by Islamist terror groups, prompting nothing more than clucking tongues and the odd cruise missile, along with being feted and encouraged by the United Nations in which Kerry pins his faith. This sprang from the 'therapeutic' mindset, which ordains that the explanation for terrorist mass murder and dehumanised barbarism must be the moral failings of its western victims. As Hanson expostulates:

'To all you of the therapeutic mindset, listen up. We can no more reason with the Islamic fascists than we could sympathize with the Nazis' demands over supposedly exploited Germans in Czechoslovakia or the problem of Tojo's Japan's not getting its timely scrap-metal shipments from Roosevelt's America. Their pouts and gripes are not intended to be adjudicated as much as to weaken the resolve of many in the United States who find the entire "war against terror" too big, or the wrong kind, of a nuisance.

Instead, read the fatwas. You hear not just of America's injustice in Palestine or Chechnya — not to mention nothing about saving Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo or Afghanistan of the 1980s — but also of what we did in Spain in the 15th century and in Tyre, Gaza, and Jerusalem in the 12th. The mystery of September 11, 2001, is not that it happened, but that it did not quite happen when first tried in 1993 during Bill Clinton's madcap efforts to move a smiling Arafat into the Lincoln Bedroom and keep our hands off bin Laden. Only an American with a JD or PhD would cling to the idea that there was not a connection between Group A Middle Eastern terrorists who attacked the WTC in 1993 and Group B who finished the job in 2001.'

Hanson thinks the American people have rumbled this and that Bush will win. Maybe so. But in Britain, the therapeutic mindset rules.