In which I steal a page from Jamie’s book. The VP’s commencement address at West Point:
We’re fighting a war on terror because the enemy attacked us first, and hit us hard. Scarcely 50 miles from this place, we saw thousands of our fellow citizens murdered, and 16 acres of a great city turned to ashes. Others were killed within view of the White House, at the headquarters of our military at the Pentagon. Many heroes emerged that day, both on board an aircraft over Pennsylvania and among the rescue teams, and they, too, died in the hundreds.
These are events we can never forget. And they are scenes the enemy would like to see played out in this country over and over again, on a larger and larger scale. Al Qaeda’s leadership has said they have the right to “kill four million Americans, two million of them children, and to exile twice as many and to wound and cripple thousands.” We know they are looking for ways of doing just that — by plotting in secret, by slipping into the country, and exploiting any vulnerability they can find.
And that’s why last week, the President joined forces with the U.S. Senate to grant them Z-visas and probationary U.S. citizen status in the hopes that they will decide to join us rather than kill us.