Weigel

Via the Albany Project, I'm actually a little taken by Rep. Nan Hayworth's message on the 9/11 anniversary. (She's a freshman who represents some of the suburbs north of New York City.) This comes off like a one-talk, oh-whatever affair, an expression of the old "9/12 Project" attitude that Americans had a chance, post-9/11, to abandon their detachment and decadence.

"I remember watching a film," she says, "actually, the night before the attacks, called American Beauty. And that film takes a rather dismal view of American character. And, strange coincidence indeed, that the very next morning, that we discover, in the most brutal possibly way, that we had reached a crossroads in our history."