Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the portion of the War on Terror which has taken place in public view has been largely prosecuted far away from the United States, a fact which positively demonstrates the war’s success thus far in keeping terrorists away from the American homeland. Unfortunately, the remoteness of known combat operations, combined with the lack of terrorist success in the United States, has had a disappointingly negative effect on Americans’ view of the war, and of the terrorist threat that still faces us – despite the fact that terrorist activity has been taking place, and even more attacks have been publicly thwarted, in countries as geographically (and strategically) close to us as Canada, Spain, and Great Britain.

There have been several high-profile plots. On March 11, 2004, Islamist terrorists conducted a coordinated bombing attack on the commuter rail system in Madrid, Spain, killing 191 people and wounding a further 1,824. On July 7, 2005, four suicide bombers – known as the “Fantastic Four” to Islamists the world over who cheered their actions – struck three London underground trains and a double-decker bus, killing 52 people and injuring 770. In June of last year, seventeen militant Muslims were arrested north of our border after Canadian law enforcement officials learned that they were not only preparing to conduct a string of terror bombings across the country, but were also plotting “to storm Parliament, take hostages and behead the prime minister...if Muslim prisoners were not freed, and if Canada did not pull its 2,300 troops out of Afghanistan.”

In August of 2006, British authorities arrested twenty-five people who were plotting to smuggle liquid explosives aboard airliners bound for the US, with what was thought to be the intention of blowing them up over the Atlantic Ocean. In late October, though, it was revealed that the would-be terrorists’ actual plan was to wait until the passenger-laden aircraft were physically over American cities before detonating them, so as to “maximize the potential loss of life and economic effect.” Terrorism expert and Georgetown University professor Bruce Hoffman said the case “indicated that Islamic extremists remain focused on attacking U.S. cities.”

Unfortunately, there are partisan, professional “Terrorism Deniers” who don’t see it that way – not even close, in fact. To many of the most vocal members of the American Left, the real enemy is not those who would kill us, but the elected President of their country, and the real priority is not fighting terrorists who target them and their families, but rather ridiculing (when not outright attempting to thwart) any actions the Bush administration takes to protect America from future attack.

One prime example of a Terrorism Denier is the Los Angeles Times’s David “Was 9/11 really that bad?” Bell, who wrote that Americans “need to overcome long habit and remind ourselves that not every enemy is in fact a threat to our existence,” and thus abandon our fanciful, farcical “War on Terror.”

Another vocal Denier is Keith Olbermann, former ESPN anchor and current host of MSNBC’s “Countdown.” When not making an inexplicable comparison between Donald Rumsfeld and Neville Chamberlain (while claiming to be the Winston Churchill or the Paul Revere of our generation), Olbermann’s favorite pastime appears to be demanding apologies from the President – who, he has declared, is suffering from “frightening and dangerous delusions” – for innumerable transgressions, including going to war to defeat Islamist terrorism, and endorsing American military tactics which are “all too comparable to the actions of the extremists” (on the rare occasion that he sees fit to acknowledge that there are actually non-American extremists in the world).

“Terrorism is still being sold to the public,” he says, “as if it were a thrilling horror movie and we were the naughty teenagers about to be its victims.”

Lately, Olbermann has added a new trick to his repertoire: reprimanding the President for not showing sufficient proof that terrorist plots (hatched, one would assume, by those same terrorists whose existence he has vehemently denied for years) have actually been stopped over the last five-plus years.

Said Olbermann of the President’s reference to a foiled “al Qaeda plot to plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast” (the Library tower in Los Angeles), which he disrespectfully described Bush as having “personally revealed so breathlessly a year ago next month”:

It was embarrassing enough that you mistakenly referred to the structure as the “Liberty Tower.” But within hours it was also revealed that authorities in Los Angeles had had no idea you were going to make any of the details – whether serious or fanciful – public.

Who terrorized Southern California that day, Mr. Bush?