Nation's security rests in hands of well-qualified team

President Bush's splendid performance in Thursday night's press conference further burnished his credentials as the right man at the right time for the right job. How fortunate we as Americans are, when the awful crucible of war is forced upon us, that we have him and not others at the helm. The national security and foreign policy team Bush has assembled -- Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz (Defense), Powell (State), Condoleeza Rice (National Security adviser), John Negroponte (UN), backed up by many others -- is as strong as any that Team USA has ever put on the field. God, indeed, continues to bless America.

It was a great day this past week when at the United Nations, Ambassador Negroponte, with approval from the president, went up to the Iraqi representative and -- paraphrasing, now -- said, "You're next."

---

American exceptionalism: Is there another country where the chief executive, within hours of the vicious attack on our people, on our soil, would make a point of visiting a mosque, bringing words of peace and protection to the devout in the name of whose religion the horrible deeds were done? What other country would devote the resources we are committing to feeding and supplying starving Afghans from the air, even as the exigencies of war demand that we bomb the tyrannical regime that enslaves them?

---

You don't say: "As an unrepentant liberal I have been a skeptic about the Bush administration. But I am deeply impressed by the president's acts." -- Richard Goodwin, former advisor to the Kennedy brothers and LBJ, and husband of noted TV historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, in the Boston Globe.

---

The difference is real leadership: "When I take action, I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive." -- President Bush, in a private Oval Office meeting the week of the attack.

---

American exceptionalism II: A lesson drummed into me at an early age is that you can be anything you want to in America, that America is the only nation in the world where it doesn't -- or needn't -- matter who your father was.

For 30 years, the teaching reigning in certain liberal quarters -- higher education, elite print media, much of the chattering class on TV -- has rejected this in a self-conscious attempt to divide America. For these people, in the name of a bogus "diversity," the only thing that mattered is who your father was. That is to say, to these folks, the only thing that mattered is your race, your gender, your ethnicity, your economic class, your claim to membership in this or that disadvantaged victim group. These people love the rise of the hyphenated Americans. They love division. They love it whenever one group of Americans can be pitted against another, making shrill demands, the better to divide us.

Isn't it wonderful that out of the ghastliness of Sept. 11, all that changed? The voices of liberal division are muted. As this writer told the Missouri Senate the day of the attacks, today there are no Democrats, no Republicans, no independents. We are Americans only, united, thrillingly, in the righteous cause of responding to this wickedness, of freeing the people imprisoned by it, of transcending it.

Peter Kinder is assistant to the chairman of Rust Communications and president pro tem of the Missouri Senate.