A Profound Failure of Guts...

So Moussaoui, a man by his own admission complicit in the deaths of almost 3000 American citizens on American soil, lives.

Living, said the jury, is a fate worse than death for this committed fanaticist.

Bullshit.

This from Penny Noonan at the Wall Street Journal:

Excuse me, I'm sorry, and I beg your pardon, but the jury's decision on Moussaoui gives me a very bad feeling. What we witnessed here was not the higher compassion but a dizzy failure of nerve.

From the moment the decision was announced yesterday, everyone, all the parties involved--the cable jockeys, the legal analysts, the politicians, the victim representatives--showed an elaborate and jarring politesse. "We thank the jury." "I accept the verdict of course." "We can't question their hard work." "I know they did their best." "We thank the media for their hard work in covering this trial." "I don't want to second-guess the jury."

How removed from our base passions we've become. Or hope to seem.

It is as if we've become sophisticated beyond our intelligence, savvy beyond wisdom. Some might say we are showing a great and careful generosity, as befits a great nation. But maybe we're just, or also, rolling in our high-mindedness like a puppy in the grass. Maybe we are losing some crude old grit. Maybe it's not good we lose it.

Are there "fates worse than death" for Muslim fanatics? Indeed, and we only have to look to the great African desert sheiks from the 19th Century, who rode hell-bent into the teeth of the British Maxims and eventually drove the Brits from their colonial holdings...cut off the offender's genitals, cut of his hands, cut off his feet, cut out his tongue, blind him and leave him wrapped in the skin of a diseased hog in the desert to ponder his wayward ways for however long his life sentence took.

But a life in a maximum security prison in Colorado?

Spare me.

I was at Ground Zero when the fires were still burning, when the heroes of that fateful day were still collecting the body parts of my fellow citizens — my brothers and sisters! — in white plastic buckets. I will carry the smell of red hot steel and charred meat — charred meat! — with me to my grave. If we as a people lack the will to bring justice to a single man, how can we claim to bring justice to Iraq, or to a region, or to the rest of this benighted world? How can we, in fact, survive at all?

When he walked out of the courtroom, Moussaoui clapped his hands and said, "America, you lost!"

On that, he was spot on...