A few things have occured to me on thinking about the attack.

1.  It has brought out the best and worst in people--from volunteers on the scene and blood donors all over to looters and price gougers and racists who now blame all Moslems--as tragedies usually do.

2.  It is disconcerting how inadequate our Intellegence community is in being able to prevent something like this.  Do we need some old fashioned humint, more electronic ears out, I don't know, but we definitely need something to allow us to prevent something like this from occuring again.

3.  I am tired of reading "it's the US's fault because we stick our nose into everyone's business", or "It's Israel's fault  because they don't repay us all our help", or "it's Islam's fault because they are a religion of hate".  That is all BULLSHIT.  The fault lies with the people who did the attack and the people who put them up to it.  WHY they did it is a distant second to the fact that they did it.  You don't get mugged, go report it to the police and expect them to debate on whether or not it happened because the mugger was an underpriviledged abused kid.  You expect them to catch the guy that did it and leave that garbage up to the defense attorney.  Debating the reasons behind it shouldn't be occuring UNTIL we catch the people that did this (or better yet, kill them as you would enemies in a war rather than arresting them as criminals).

4.  I'm sick and tired of the touchy-feelie stuff that I keep hearing.  "Oh, I don't know how I can deal with it" from people who have no direct connection with the tragedy.  Or schools providing counselors to the kids--why, because they don't want the kids to talk about nuking the bastards that did this?  What happened to the people who built the country, had whole families wiped out by tragedies, and the sole survivor went on to prosper?  Now a days, I would expect a lot of the country to seek professional help after something like this.  In my opinion, the people who really do and will need help are the victims, their families, the rescuers who had to deal with the death and destruction first hand not the rest of the people who catch it on CNN.  The rest of the country should have a slow simmering anger and a resolve to kill the people who did this--that 97 year old great grandmother you just passed on the street should be willing to chew Bin Laden's throat out with her dentures given the chance.  

5.  And last but not least, what if we had listened to the Greenpeace/Sierra Club/Earth First idiots who claim we should live in a population density 5x more dense than Manhattan is now to save the green spaces in the country?  How many people would have died then?