A Leader

A dirty bomb. Millions dead in a U.S. city . Chaos. Panic. Immeasurable grief. The images of destruction and death on TV news replayed over and over.

Tell me this never entered your mind after 9-11. Tell me that somewhere in the back of all our minds we did not wonder if something like that could happen. Tell me you didn't think about it. I won't believe you. We all did.

If, in the 90's, Hollywood had made a movie about planes of people being flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we would have shook our heads at the imagination of the writers. We never imagined it, we never saw it coming.

Now we do imagine it. We think about some thing put in a water system in a big city, poisoning millions. We think about radical Islamists taking over several elementary schools, like they did in Beslan. We shudder at the horror the parents would feel. We wonder what actions we would take. We think about suicide bombers in the subways and in malls. We don't think about those things much. Just in moments. When something on TV reminds us. We push it out of our minds. We can't live in fear.

But we know. We know it could happen.

This isn't about fearmongering. It's about the "what if." If any of those things happened, would you be shocked? Or would we know deep in our hearts that we knew all along it was possible.

Now close your eyes and see those things for a moment. In your mind's eye you see the bombed out buildings of downtown LA. You see the people brought in on stretchers to hospitals from poisoning. You see the military and swat teams as they surround the elementary schools. You see our fighter jets in the sky. Do you see it?

Dramatic? Yes. Impossible? We all know the answer to that.

Now think about who you would want to be President if any of this happened.

Would you want a small time Governor from Arkansas with no experience, but a really great guy?

Would you want a Congressman turned actor?

Would you want a pretty rich boy who knows how to run a business and a state, but not our military?

Would you want a liberal woman with no military experience or an inspiring black man with even less?

No, I'll tell you who you would want. John McCain. A man who knows war. A man who understands a brutal enemy.

Because if any of those things happened, no one would care about McCain/Feingold or granting amnesty to illegal aliens. Those concerns would vanish. All we would focus on is a leader.

A leader.