The Big Picture

Mark Steyn is still on his game. Today's column is about Fahrenheit 9-11, the Left's worldview and the big picture. Here are two key points:

Americans, Moore told The Daily Mirror in London, are "the dumbest people on the planet. We don't know about anything that's happening outside our country. Our stupidity is embarrassing." Yet he's the one who's come up with the hickiest, most parochial thesis imaginable: that the horrors of the age are just some screwy distraction got up by a chad-wangling moron fratboy's creepy neocon viziers.

This is the real difference – between those who see the big picture and those who insist there is no big picture to see, that Michael Moore's small hick picture is the answer to everything. In the days after September 11, the fringe Left were fond of lecturing us that we needed to address the "root causes." Well, they got tired of that. If it's a choice between some big socioeconomic geopolitical root cause or Dick Cheney, they'll take Cheney.

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What did 9/11 cost its perpetrators? Flight lessons would be below $5,000 depending on how impatient the hijackers were (as Zac Massaoui told his instructors, he didn't need to learn how to land), boxcutters cost a couple of bucks, add in a couple of rental cars and hotel accommodation, and that's it: For somewhere around $150,000, the 19 terrorists killed more than 3,000 people and caused immediate economic damage of $27 billion, with the final tab yet to be calculated. That makes it surely the biggest bang for the buck in world history.

Read it all.