Seven years. It's been seven years since George W. Bush promised to capture one elderly, infirm, diabetic and dependent on regular dialysis, former personnel clerk turned poet and part time terrorist mastermind "dead or alive." You'd think it was difficult, or something.Seven years since the World Trade Center crashed to the ground, crushing to death just a hair under 2,000 people. There are people in America who are old enough to vote who were still in grade school, who have no conscious memory of the World Trade Center towers before they caught fire, no sense of what the New York skyline looked like seven years ago and a day except a vague sense they got from old movies and old photographs. And, of course, the site of the disaster is only barely just upgraded from a hole in the ground; seven years later, it's a hole in the ground with a couple of steel beams sticking up.Seven years since we found out that the mastermind of those attacks was the deputy defense minister of Afghanistan, who had his headquarters in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Seven years since we told the religious party that was governing that country that they could either give him up to us or defend him. They chose to defend him, and mere months later we rolled right over that headquarters building in Kandahar, and that's good. But it occurred to me last night that we almost certainly have troops in Afghanistan, still fighting that religious party, still trying to keep that mastermind from moving his headquarters back into that building in Kandahar, who were stillon that day. Can they possibly remember, really, what it is that they're fighting for there? What does our fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan mean to someone who was just about to turn 11 years old when the Taliban chose to side with bin Laden against the whole world?Seven years since we found out the hard way what the Israelis had been warning us about since the 1950s, that a policy of automatic surrender to air pirates was a disaster waiting to happen. Seven years since we turned the defense of our airports over to the same old rent-a-cops, but instead supervised by incompetent political appointees at three times the price. Seven years, and not once have they passed an internal audit or a journalist's test with any better than a 30% score, seven years that we've known that on any day that new air pirates chose to try to smuggle weapons or explosives on board, if there are three or more planes targeted, two of them are getting through. Seven years that we've known that we really did need to get on the stick, do what we should have done after the Lockerbie bombing and find some better way to screen cargo and luggage and some better way to supervise ground crews.Seven years of instead harrassing thousands of Americans for having names that sort of sound like someone the department of homeland security thinks might be a terrorist, not that they know for sure (or else they'd just go get them), while not even inconveniencing any hypothetical terrorist minimally bright enough to use a fake name. Seven years of searching everybody's shoes and Taking Shampoo Away because our leaders are still too dumb to tell the difference between scientific and engineering reality and a bad movie plot device made up by some guy who knows that if he doesn't think of some terrorist conspiracy to pretend to know about, we'll keep treating him the exact same way that the Viet Cong treated John McCain. It's a damned good thing we shut down their headquarters and made huge inroads into their ability to money launder in the first few months after the attack, because if we were depending on the DHS and the TSA to keep us safe, we'd have all gone up in flames by now.*sigh*I know it's not supposed to be a day for politics. But after seven damned years, I'm sick and tired of being governed, at a time like this, by a President from a political party that doesn't believe that government can possibly do anything right, a party that thinks that government spending exists only to enrich government contractors, that thinks that since all government iscorrupt there's no point in even trying to appoint honest people or keep the people in government even mininally honest. If nothing else, I can't shake the suspicion, today, that if the US Supreme Court had done with a century and a half of US and Florida law required them to do and declined to hearand what happened seven years ago had happened anyway, then at least one of the things we'd done about it in the last four years would have been right. All of them? Maybe not. But if we'd been governed by a party that at least theoretically believes in the possibility of minimally honest and minimally competent government, we'd have at least a couple of more successes to cheer us up on this, the 7th anniversary of 9/11.