Today, we got this…

“Spare no effort,” Mr. President?

The guy shouted “Allahu Akbar” while spraying down a bus full of American servicemen.

Does it take a congressional inquiry to figure this out?

Unbelievable.

We are in the middle of an existential civilizational struggle with an enemy who believes the path to paradise is paved with the skulls of murdered infidels, and we refuse to even name that enemy.

Today’s attack was an atrocity. An outrage, as even Obama called it. But it was nothing compared to what is in store for us unless we begin to recognize our enemy for who he is.

This is a problem on the Left, for whom making common cause with Islamists appears to be a good idea. But it’s also a problem on the Right, which is just as riddled with examples of denial. Chief among those seems to be this movement, inspired by Ron Paul, which holds that it’s our involvement in the Middle East that has produced terrorism. That signifies a willful ignorance of history; those elements within the Tea Party who equate the admonitions against adventurism abroad by some of our Founding Fathers to an isolationist policy today forget that the first war an independent America engaged in was with the Barbary Pirates – who preyed upon American civilians in the name of Allah.

It is inconvenient in our current situation that we have an implacable enemy who wants to kill us. We need to get our fiscal house in order and we lack the resources to play the world’s cop on the beat. Here at the Hayride we have no interest in American military intervention in Libya, though we would have supported the idea of taking another shot at a decapitation strike against Qaddafi via the air – or even arming the rebels there. That means another Iraq or Afghanistan, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates noted today, is out of the question. For better or worse.

But there’s a difference between going on a crusade to civilize the Muslim world and treating that part of the world with a well-deserved suspicion. The vast majority of the world’s terrorists are Muslims; that’s a fact. The vast majority of American mosques are owned by a trust set up by the Saudis to proselytize a virulent brand of Islam; that’s a fact, too. There is a very active and very dangerous Muslim Brotherhood presence in this country; another fact, and there is a growing number of Americans turning up on battlefields and in terrorist plots against this country.

If we can’t even call an Islamic terrorist attack what it is, something Obama failed to do today and failed miserably to do when Nidal Hassan killed another 13 members of our military, how are we supposed to muster the national will to insulate ourselves from this threat? Is it really acceptable for America to go down the same road to cultural flaccidity Great Britain, Germany, Italy, France, Holland and Sweden have gone down? Because that is what’s in store for us. And our enemy regards those decadent European countries as appetizers.

We’re the main course.