Is there some sort of bizarre essay contest going on in Conservative Land? Something like "Write a speculative scenario of 1000 words or less proving that, if 9/11 had never happened, liberals would be even more treasonously evil than they are now"?

National Review Online has posted a teasing excerpt from "A Nightline Fantasia" by Rob Long. (The full piece appears in the May issue of the print National Review, which I haven't seen.) It's September 15, 2001, and Ted Koppel is interviewing an angry Mohammed Atta:

TED KOPPEL: "Mr. Atta, if I may, it seems that what you're saying here . . ."

MOHAMED ATTA: "It's all in our lawsuit."

TED KOPPEL: "If I may, sir, it seems that what you're saying here is that the government systematically profiled you and your associates . . ."

MOHAMED ATTA: "My associates? Mr. Koppel, I didn't know all of the gentlemen they detained. Oh, one or two I knew from around, you know, Hamburg and Kabul and flight school. But we were nodding, hey-how-are-you friends. Not close. I wouldn't say close."

OK, let's see: On December 14, 1999, a U.S. border agent thought an Algerian man named Ahmed Ressam, who was crossing in from Canada, looked suspicious. His car was searched, suspicious items were found, and he was arrested. Several more Algerians connected to Ressam were arrested shortly after that.

This was the millennium bomb plot. (Timeline here.)

Remember anyone complaining about racial profiling after all those Algerians were arrested? Me either.

Long's is the third such essay published this month. Prior to his article, we had "An Alternative History" by Gregg Easterbrook -- in which Bush, after reading the August 6 PDB, sends "thousands of" men into Afghanistan the very next day (apparently he pulls this off by putting the men and supplies through a Star Trek transporter);* Bush is subsequently impeached, then removed from office by a unanimous Senate vote (all Republican senators have presumably been sent to internment camps by Hillary Clinton's jackbooted reeducation police). Condi Rice is tried as a war criminal.

We've also had this essay from Kathleen Parker, in which Bush (on 9/10/01) bombs Afghanistan and the Taliban is driven from power (seemingly after just one day of bombing) -- and Bush, years later, is on the verge of being charged with genocide by a U.N. tribunal. (Plausible, no? Remember the tribunal that tried Bill Clinton on charges of genocide after Kosovo?) Bush also has the 9/11 plotters arrested before the fact, to (naturally) howls of protest. (Parker's scenario takes place in 2004; presumably, no hard evidence linking the 9/11 plotters to their plot, or to any other terrorist plot or act, is discovered in two and a half years.) Oh, and in their revulsion at one day's bombing and one series of arrests, the American people -- peaceniks as always -- have embraced the pacifist presidential campaign of John Kerry.

As the conservative essayists prattle on about war-crimes trials and impeachment, don't forget that we didn't even impeach anyone over Vietnam. Clinton wasn't impeached for Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, or the '98 bombs aimed at bin Laden; Reagan wasn't impeached for Iran-Contra, the mining of Nicaraguan harbors, Beirut, or Grenada. Kennedy's poll numbers went up after the Bay of Pigs. Bush's poll numbers are going up now.

Conservatives don't care. Conservatives just have a desperate need to feel persecuted by a worldwide conspiracy of sandal-wearing liberals.

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*Thanks to SullyWatch for noting this absurdity.