There’s been some speculation about John Bolton running for president. He actually might be the right antidote to Obama; the guy looks like he has more real world experience in his mighty mustache than Obama has in his entire cabinet.

The problem with Obama is that we have a ton of real world problems and it’s now obvious Obama has no experience at doing anything useful ever. People thought he’d be a new politicians, but all he ending up being was the larva of one of those useless career politicians we all hate. He’s like a younger Biden. By 2012, people are going to be desperate for someone who actually knows how to do something, and one look at John Bolton and you know this guy didn’t get where he was just on his personal charisma and charm.

So Bolton is worth consideration. Plus, he already has an awesome slogan ready: ‘Stache Strength!

It’s the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks tomorrow. It’s a good time to reflect, but I’m not sure everyone knows on what exactly. Of course, there are the tragic deaths, but one of the reasons to remember is to keep in mind the lessons we need to learn to keep such a horror from happening again. And what is that lesson?

Here’s what I think we need to learn from 9/11: There are large numbers of violent, irrational people out there and we can’t just ignore them and hope they go away. As we sit around with our iPads and our DVRs and enjoy our culture, it’s easy to forget there are barbarians standing just outside. They aren’t very good at anything, but they would like to see us dead.

I don’t think in this post 9/11 world most people have learned the appropriate lesson from this. The whole Koran burning insanity illustrates this. That a handful of people in Florida can hold the world hostage by threatening to burn a few books is beyond silly, yet the main reaction has been not to tackle how ridiculous that is but to figure out how to appease the irrational violent people. You can’t appease irrational people. They’ll get violent over one guy burning Korans. They’ll get violent over cartoons. They’ll get violent because of false rumors of Korans being flushed down toilets. And yet are focus is on how to keep these crazy people happy and calm.

There’s a popular school of thought that if we just got out of the Middle East, then all the irrational violent people would be happy and stuff. We want to prescribe rational notions to irrational people. The left think the people in the Middle East are like angry dogs; you can just do a few tricks to keep their simple minds calm. But they’re people, and people have a complex crazy. And you can’t just push that crazy off to some isolated area and think it will all work out for the better. At some point, we have to engage it. That doesn’t just mean militarily — hopefully it doesn’t mean anymore fighting — but at some point we have to stand up for ourselves. We can’t have people attack us and be all like, “Oh, we’re sorry. Let’s try to be nicer to you people.” We act weak, and we get attacked. The radical Muslims are stomping all over Europe now because those people are nothing but weak; they can’t even stand up for their culture anymore. We have to be strong, and if we’re strong enough, we can give people something better to hold onto that their current violent, craziness. The culture over there has to change one day, and we might as well lead the way.

We haven’t been good at the not being weak lately. We can do better. We can’t appease the craziness in the Middle East — we have to be more willing to call it out. With all the oppression and violence that goes on there every day, we should have been more willing to ridicule the notion that a bunch of Korans burning was anything worth our attention.

Well, that’s my ramble. 9/11 is complicated. There’s my attempt this year to figure some things out.