Maximus Bush

The Roman general, Maximus, calmly reaffirms with his commanders their most cherished values – "strength and honor" – and then quietly orders: "At my signal, unleash hell." In the War on Moslem Terrorism being waged today, George W. Bush has become America's Maximus.

By contrast – and only for a moment, as any longer risks nausea – try imagining the state America would be in if The Atrocity of Sept. 11 had been committed under a Clinton or Gore presidency.

The voices of the left would rise unchecked to claim America somehow deserved it, we would be sinking into a quicksand of demoralized gloom, the economy would have no hope of recovery, and the thousands of human beings slaughtered at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon would have died in vain.

Maximus Bush in the White House insures that those thousands have not died in vain.

The tens of thousands of orphaned children, widows, widowers and grieving friends of the victims can take solace in the fact that the deaths of their loved ones are not only being avenged but are also directly responsible for a reflowering of what has made America good and great, and a cleansing of the social poisons so damaging to America's cultural health.

The cesspools of multiculturalist-diversity-feminazi – "hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go" – anti-globalist, anti-American political correctness lunacy are being washed away in a sea of American flags. The most miasmatic of these cesspools are on our college campuses, and in them kids are rebelling against their old-fogey professors who still hold tightly to retrograde resentments toward Western Civilization.

This would not be happening if a Clinton or Gore responded to The Atrocity by lobbing a few ineffectual cruise missiles ("Monica Missiles") at OBL, sat around wringing their hands afraid to do anything serious lest "the whole Moslem world be against us," and the rest of America sat cowering in fear of the next terrorist assault.

This is what OBL expected of us. He expected GW to be no different from a Bill Clinton or an Al Gore. As Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator would say, "Big mistake."

Yes, the "world has changed," as we constantly hear, since Sept. 11. Yet the change has been caused not by the attack on America, but by America's reaction to it. The source of that reaction is Maximus Bush unswervingly deciding to unleash hell upon the attackers.

My friend Peggy Noonan has just written a marvelous book about Ronald Reagan entitled "When Character Was King." Peggy may now be wishing she had given it another title – for character, which certainly disappeared from American politics in the 1990s, is back, big time, with GW.

The man of character and integrity, the man who says what he means and means what he says, is the man left-wing intellectuals hate and fear the most. That's why they hated and feared John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, and why they loved and defended the antithesis of those virtues, Bill Clinton.

Now, at one of America's darkest moments, there appears at her helm a man of those virtues, committed without apology to exterminating the threat posed by her enemies.

OBL was not the only one to gravely misjudge GW. Millions of Moslems, from Cairo to Jakarta, cheered the attack on America. Tens of thousands of young Moslem men around the world proclaimed Jihad Against America and announced their intention to go to Afghanistan to fight on the side of their Taliban brothers.

Thousands of Pakistani men actually did so, streaming across the border into Afghanistan with a Kalashnikov in their hands and a chant of "Death to America" on their lips. Their fate was to receive their martyr's death via a Daisy Cutter or other American ordnance, flee frightened out of their wits back to Pakistan, or lie captured in some anti-Taliban jail whimpering to Western reporters how they "just want to go home."

The cheering on the "Arab Street" is no more. The Taliban are toast. The mass demonstrations waving OBL posters have all but vanished. Nobody loves a loser – and George W. Maximus Bush has made a loser out of Osama bin Laden.

The human being still has much in common with the wolf, our main competitor for prehistoric eons in the same ecological niche: hunting big animals in packs. When two alpha wolves fight, the rest of the pack stays out until they see who will be the winner – then they pounce on the loser.

Watch now how many in the Moslem world will pounce on OBL.

You get one guess as to who is the most nervous man in the world right now. It's not OBL, who knows his fate is sealed.

Right – Saddam Hussein. The path has been cleared, the targeting has been announced (by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, completely ignoring the pathetic protestations of Powell's State Department). Saddam is next. The Arab/Moslem world will not attempt to stand in the way of his destruction.

With Saddam gone, the world will pick up the clarion call for Arab/Moslem democracy. First to heed it will be Iran. A secular democracy similar to Turkey's will be the intended goal for all Islamic countries.

Would you hazard to guess which is the most nervous country in the world now? A good candidate would be China. GW is engineering what may be a for-real actual alliance between the U.S. and Russia – and thanks to it, Russia may pull itself out of its abyss and prosper.

A for-real actual alliance may also emerge between the U.S. and India – with Indian naval might counterbalancing China. A U.S.-Russia-India alliance would be a total nightmare for the Chicoms, especially when their economy is flirting with collapse as the world figures out their productivity claims are a charade.

Of course, the War on Moslem Terrorism is not yet over – but now we can see that, whatever trials lay ahead, it will be won. It is thanks to GW that America, Western Civilization and the world in general will emerge out of this horrible tragedy stronger and safer than it was before. It will also emerge more prosperous, as democratic capitalism will be more secure to flourish.

Thanks to Maximus Bush, America has a leader of character and integrity – of strength and honor – who has seared into her enemies' brains the Texas message writ global: DMWA. Don't Mess With America.