How the 9/11 Anniversary Got Oprahed

Mark Steyn:

Much the September 11, 2001, anniversary coverage struck me as distastefully tasteful. On the morning of Sept. 12, I was pumping gas just off Interstate 91 in Vermont and picked up the Valley News. Its lead headline covered the annual roll call of the dead -- or, as the alliterative editor put it, "Litany of the lost." That would be a grand entry for "Litany of the Lame," an anthology of the all-time worst headlines. September 11 wasn't a shipwreck: the dead weren't "lost": They were murdered.
So I skipped that story. Underneath was something headlined "Half a decade gone by, a reporter still cannot comprehend why." Well, in that case maybe you shouldn't be in the reporting business. After half a decade, it's not that hard to "comprehend": Osama bin Laden issued a declaration of war and then his agents carried out a big attack. He talked the talk, his boys walked the walk. If you need to flesh it out a bit, you could go to the library and look up a book.
But, of course, that's not what the headline means: Instead, it's "incomprehensible" in the sense, that to persons of a certain mushily "progressive" disposition, all such acts are "incomprehensible," all violence is "senseless." Unfortunately, it made perfect sense to the perpetrators. That is what the headline writer finds hard to "comprehend" -- or, rather, doesn't wish to comprehend.

Isn't it odd how the LWM treats natural disasters as things the government can and ought to prevent but acts of war as unalterable forces of nature?