And then (sigh) there is The Guardian

In stark contrast to The Times, of course, is The Guardian, which has pasted mindless and incoherent analysis on its pages.

The lead editorial starts in productive fashion, recognizing the terror attacks for the evil that they are and properly congratulating the population for handling it well:

Just like their predecessors in the face of those earlier horrors, today's generation of Londoners responded to this latest unprovoked act of evil - which in terms of lost lives seems to have been the deadliest act of terrorism in our modern history - with a combination of calm and courage.

(I can’t help but wonder if Chris Patten will now come down on The Guardian for its “absolutist and simplistic” view of the terror attacks as “evil”.) It even makes the sensible distinction between the new terrorism and what London has experienced in the past:

The terror of the past was ultimately political. It was a means to an end. We could either defeat it, submit to it or negotiate with it. Terror like yesterday's is more elusive and less formal. It is not a movement or an army in any traditional sense. Its sense of itself is apocalyptic rather than political. Its demands are therefore difficult to meet, even if negotiation was either practicable or acceptable.

But ultimately it dissolves into the sappy and unedifying rhetoric of the left…that the attacks were an attack on our “hope” and “inclusiveness”, and that we must try to “understand” the “anger” of those who would kill us. The Guardian goes on to urge us to “drain...the reservoir of grievances from which the terrorists draw strength.” Given The Guardian’s own acknowledgement of the absence of political motivation and the futility of negotiation, this suggestion is particularly incoherent.

But the editorial is entirely reasonable compared to other commentary that adorns its pages. We get Robin Cook, whose capacity for blaming the west for the acts of others seems boundless.

In the absence of anyone else owning up to yesterday's crimes, we will be subjected to a spate of articles analysing the threat of militant Islam. Ironically they will fall in the same week that we recall the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica, when the powerful nations of Europe failed to protect 8,000 Muslims from being annihilated in the worst terrorist act in Europe of the past generation.

Of course, Cook goes on to inform us that terrorism cannot be defeated by military power. Given that view, along with his known disapproval of the US military action to unseat a man who annihilated hundreds of thousands of Muslims, one must wonder what exactly Cook would have had the European powers do to protect the Muslims of Srebrenica. And speaking of irony, what is one to make of someone who, for the purposes of establishing the biting irony of his own observations, conflates militant Islam with your average Srebrenican Muslim and then lectures us that we should “isolate” the militant terrorists from the moderate elements of Islam?

Cook gives us the same old drivel…the CIA created Bin Laden, the real danger is the west’s response to terrorism, we are alienating those moderate Muslims into silence with our actions. It apparently never occurs to Cook to wonder whether these allegedly moderate Muslims are alienating us from them with their silence and inaction on terrorism. And of course, a left-wing harangue on terrorism wouldn’t be complete without the well-worn myth that poverty “breeds” terrorism.

Cook, also demonstrates his keen sense of logic:

President Bush is given to justifying the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that by fighting terrorism abroad, it protects the west from having to fight terrorists at home. Whatever else can be said in defence of the war in Iraq today, it cannot be claimed that it has protected us from terrorism on our soil.

I wonder if he would also argue that a leak in the roof demonstrates that a house has not provided protection from the elements. (It is worth mentioning that this piece of Cook wisdom was considered so notable that The Guardian quoted it in its own editorial.)

But for true moonbat loopiness, few can beat Polly Toynbee. Yesterday I (perhaps uncharitably) chastised Blair for suggesting that the attacks were made all the worse because they disrupted the G8 meetings. Today Toynbee congratulates him for saying precisely that. It is an odd moral calculus which leads one to think that the barbarity of blowing up innocents on a train somehow weighs less as long as it doesn’t interrupt the preening of a bunch of politicians. But then what can you expect from someone who draws a moral equivalence between terrorists and American cotton farmers:

Barbaric might also be 30,000 children a day dying in Africa while a mere 25,000 US cotton farmers keep their trade-denying subsidies.

Don’t blame the cotton farmers, Polly. They just need to be “understood”.

And then there is this lunacy:

George Bush is the one person who could and should have felt beholden to give a good response to this disaster, in support of his ally. But with typical inadequacy it was beyond his imaginative grasp to be extra magnanimous either to Blair or to the world in his offers on climate change, aid and trade.

Sure. And in the days after 9/11, Blair should have expressed his support for Bush by backing Social Security reform. What is wrong with this woman?

Finally, showing a complete lack of self-awareness, Toynbee sagely predicts that:

No doubt, as usual, many will use these attacks as an excuse to justify their own stance.

This, of course, coming literally one sentence after having suggested that the way to “deny terrorism the oxygen of justification” is for Bush to jump on board the global-warming bandwagon.

Embarrassment, it seems, is a concept alien to editors at The Guardian.