And in case it isn't clear that the Right now feels the need to attack anyone who threatens Bush's reelection chances (see the post directly below), here comes Dorothy Rabinowitz in The Wall Street Journal with an attack on 9/11 widows -- specifically the widows known as the Jersey Girls, and any other 9/11 survivors who agree with them:

Who, listening to them, would not be struck by the fact that all their fury and accusation is aimed not at the killers who snuffed out their husbands' and so many other lives, but at the American president, his administration, and an ever wider assortment of targets including the Air Force, the Port Authority, the City of New York? In the public pronouncements of the Jersey Girls we find, indeed, hardly a jot of accusatory rage at the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. We have, on the other hand, more than a few declarations like that of Ms. Breitweiser, announcing that "President Bush and his workers ... were the individuals that failed my husband and the 3,000 people that day."

Rabinowitz is a smart woman, but she fails to understand plain words. Fail, in this context, means (according to my dictionary) "to disappoint the expectations or trust of." Al Qaeda didn't fail the 9/11 victims -- the victims placed no trust in Al Qaeda.

Rabinowitz goes on from there to talk about "the darker side of this spectacle of the widows" -- which is, specifically, that they now seem to have the right to pass judgment on 9/11.

But why does this surprise her? For more than thirty years in this country, conservative politicians have pushed the concept of victims' rights. The notion that victims should speak in court before criminals are sentenced came from the "law and order" right. The "law and order" right supports law after law specifically named after victims -- "Megan's Law," "Laci's Law," and so on. This is bipartisan now, but a generation ago it was a way of using victims to attack Democrats and liberals as "soft on crime." This is simply how we do things in America now. We can't ask victims to speak and then tell them to shut up if they don't say what we want to hear.