David Brooks on Beslan and the Islamist cult of death.

Christopher Hitchens on the Nation‘s new love of jihad. Brilliant, as usual.

Orson Scott Card reviews Hugh Hewitt’s new book and says, “As a Democrat, I would hope that a solid trouncing of our fanatic-ruled party at the polls this November would serve as a wakeup call and remind Democrats that they only get to do the things that the Democrat Party exists to do if they get enough votes to control the White House and Congress. Which requires that you have serious candidates and embrace serious issues that most Americans, not just tiny pressure groups, care about. And on that day, Democratic moderates can take the party back.”

This is a big question. If Bush loses, it’s a foregone conclusion that their will be a Republical crack-up. But if Kerry loses, will the Democrats do a serious reassessment of their party and jettison the Deaniac wing they way the GOP pushed out the Buchananites?

Glenn Reynolds says The Sims are good for America’s youth. How about the America’s 30-year-old adolescent slackers?

Matt Labash has a truly brilliant profile of Stephen Baldwin up. Who knew that the actor I remember most as Fenster’s lover and the guy who sang, “Old MacDonald had a farm, ee-i-ee-i-oh; And on his farm he shot some guys, ba-da-bip, ba-da-bing, bang-boom” was a born-again?

Will Vanity Fair go ahead and hire Labash already? He’s only the best celebrity profiler working right now.

The Washington Post’s report on Dick Cheney’s speech (09/07) in Iowa strikes me as plainly misleading. “Cheney Says ‘Wrong Choice’ Risks Terrorist Attack” is the headline. What should follow is an article showing Cheney saying, in effect, ‘Vote Bush-Cheney or else the United States may suffer another terrorist attack.’ Which, if the vice president said it, is definitely news.

Here’s the paragraph from the Cheney speech:

We made decisions at the end of World War II, at the beginning of the Cold War, when we set up the Department of Defense, and the CIA, and we created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and undertook a bunch of major policy steps that then were in place for the next 40 years, that were key to our ultimate success in the Cold War, that were supported by Democrat and Republican alike — Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower and Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and Gerry Ford and a whole bunch of Presidents, from both parties, supported those policies over a long period of time. We’re now at that point where we’re making that kind of decision for the next 30 or 40 years, and it’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2nd, we make the right choice. Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again. That we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we’ll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind set if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we’re not really at war. I think that would be a terrible mistake for us.

What Cheney is clearly saying is that under a Kerry-Edwards administration, if the United States were attacked by terrorists, we would not pursue the same tough strategy we adopted after 9/11. Instead of striking back and continuing with the Bush Doctrine, we would probably tend toward the pinprick reprisals of Clinton and maybe wait for the United Nations to flex its muscles. We’d “fall back into a pre-9/11 mindset.”

In sum, a Kerry administration would likely consider a terrorist attack on the United States merely a crime, rather than a casus belli. Whether you buy this argument or not, it’s not an argument that we’ll suffer a new terrorist attack if a plurality of voters supports Kerry-Edwards in November.

Where the WashPost leads, others follow: Just caught the local news version of this same story on channel 9 in Washington with that independent mind Gordon Petersen.

Bill Kristol has a short piece on Kerry’s new line on Iraq: “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Sound familiar? That’s because Howard Dean used it during the primaries. You’ll never guess who went after Dean, at the time, saying he didn’t “have the judgment to be president or the credibility to be elected president.” . . .

The key to Mark Steyn’s excellent column on the Beslan massacre lies here:

The reality is that the IRA and ETA and the ANC and any number of secessionist and nationalist movements all the way back to the American revolutionaries could have seized schoolhouses and shot all the children.

But they didn’t. Because, if they had, there would have been widespread revulsion within the perpetrators’ own communities. To put it at its most tactful, that doesn’t seem to be an issue here.

This hasn’t been lost on some people. Abdulrahman al-Rashed, a prominent Arab television executive, penned a column for Asharq Al-Awsat, headlined, The Painful Truth: All the World Terrorists are Muslims! (I haven’t been able to find the original, but this Jerusalem Post summary gives a hint of what seems to be the flavor of the piece.)

At the Republican convention in New York, John McCain, Ron Silver, and Rudy Giuliani (among others) highlighted this truth: That the war on terror is really a war against a virulent strain of Islamism. Is it the whole of Islam? Surely not. But is this branch of Islamism prevalent enough to swamp the healthy Islam practiced by most Muslims? Absolutely. As someone once pointed out, how many Bolsheviks did it take to transform Russia in 1917? If your purpose is sick enough, and your methods brutal enough, you don’t need a majority.

The second point which Steyn makes clear is that this is a pivotal moment with regard to Russia. President Bush should do whatever it takes to bring Putin back into the fold, to show the world that America and Russia share a common enemy in the war on terror.