MINNEAPOLIS--Amid a sea of uplifting patriotic ads on Sept. 11, 2002, including a full-page "United We Stand" ad on the back of the "A" section, a curious editorial titled "One year" marks the anniversary of the deadliest attack on American soil. Fully 30 column-inches long, unsigned, it weeps not for 9/11 victims, nor blames the terrorists.

Instead, it rips our national psyche and claims that American miserliness to the Third World figures big time in the blame for 9/11. One local letter-writer calls it the "lowest blow ever delivered" by this McClatchy-owned daily, self-styled "Newspaper of the Twin Cities." (This label stiffs Knight Ridder's rival St. Paul Pioneer Press, which might tell us something about the Minneapolis's paper smugness.)

That Star Tribune ("Strib" to Minnesotans) would abuse this sad occasion to (1) bash President Bush; (2) marginalize our military; (3) blame Americans' core values and "way of life" as culpable for 9/11, staggers the mind. But the editorial is a virtual window on the postmodernist muck that holds us responsible for every ill anywhere on planet Earth.

"Strib's" 9/11 scathing swipe goes beyond loony to the ludicrous. Read it for yourself at this URL: www.startribune.com/stories/1519/3223661.html

Note the terrorist-murderers escape much notice. Their tactics, their national origins, their titular religion are not laid bare. Served by this smokescreen are twin pillars of liberal dogma, political correctness and multiculturalism. Now that's fine if you're into making excuses for atrocious conduct, and adopting delusions about, let's say, not profiling likely suspects.

"One year" begins compassionately enough, about the monstrous heartbreak of 9/11. Soon the piece turns ugly, spinning facts, spewing partisan bile and, ever-so predictably now, bashing the president. So what else is new?.

Dislodging al-Queda and its Taliban hosts from their Afghan bases "has [not] worked as an answer to terror," insists the editorial. Could've fooled me. Who said taking out terrorists only in Afghanistan was the sole answer. Nobody. "Strib's" strawman collapses, a non sequitur based on hot air, just another cheap shot.

About our military's fight with terrorism, the editorial grudgingly admits it "showed promise." Let's see now: Our GI Joes and Janes rout the bad guys, smash an evil regime, snatch terrorists still and send 'em scurrying, killing and capturing others. And this is mere "promise"? C'mon. Get real.

Routinely assaulting Bush as commander-in-chief is one thing, but our military, too? Tell that to military service families whose loved ones protect the poison pen-pushers in their ivory tower editorial shops. Tell that to the "real" Americans, more than 70% of whom support the Bush administration moves. Tell that, well, to the Marines.

"Strib" impugns Bush for doing "nothing" --yes, "nothing" --to lead after 9/11. "Just shop," he is said to have said, little else. Fact-based assertion? Nope. Just another rhetorical cheap shot. (Is there No End?) Ah, but we've come to expect such jabberwocky in the one-sided liberal media. Facts don't matter. "Liberals argue against incontrovertible facts," says best-selling author Ann Coulter in "Slander." That's all too true, I've personally discovered.

In "Strib's" inverted world, America's image "could hardly be lower." Does this reflect the newspaper's perception, wish, or reality? (Hint: One of the first two?) To prove its dark hypothesis, the writer picks a highly critical quote from a left-wing Canadian newspaper. Columnist Jeffrey Simpson in the Toronto Globe & Mail denounces his good neighbor's "moral standing in the world." (Take that!, USA.)

"Never lower," sniffs the Star Tribune, without so much as a skeptical pause. So much for what passes in the Twin Cities (and Toronto) for discussion of the issues.

Most insulting of all is linking Third World poverty with the hijacked airliners smashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center-- "above Wall Street." First, no nexus attaches to such a linkage. The Pentagon attack, plus another aimed at the Capitol, are ignored. Left unsaid also is the fact that the 9/11 terrorists were financially well-off. Their leader, dead or alive, was (is?) a Saudi multimillionaire. Not exactly stuff of an envious, spiteful Third World.

So who's the real enemy of 9/11? Star Tribune's submits it's us, We the People: "No matter how many [al-Queda] are captured and convicted [emphasis added here], the enemy of Sept. 11 cannot readily be conquered. The reason the foe can't be quickly quelled is that he lurks not just beyond our sight, but also within us [sic]." So the late great cartoonist Walt Kelly's "Pogo" line is revisited: "We have met the enemy and he is US!"

Such an editorial, blind to facts, deaf to irony, exposes for all who care to see, liberal postmodernism's thinly veiled moral relativism. Even the most artful of postmodernism cannot deny facts, such as buildings' rubble and 3,000 lives lost. Moral truth is "out there," whether the raving PC left accepts it or not. Their self-loathing guilt-laden blame-"Amerika" PC hand-wringing is hardly new. An irate "Strib" letter to the editor nails it: "The floodgates of your leftover '60s-era hatred of American were blown wide open." Amen.

Twisting truth to suit biases and conceit, this commentary mocks reality. Such uncritical, amoral, moral relativism undercuts our nation, and would make enemies even of ourselves. Americans deserve better than they're getting from the unquestioning, unquestionably liberal mainstream media. 'Tis a pity, really.

Larson is a former association executive and business magazine editor. Retired now in northem Minnesota, he is not the retired cartoonist of the same name. He has a BA in journalism from the University of Minnesota.