In some sense, this is a necessary wake up call. After 9/11, for all his faults, George W. Bush was a decent man with some sense of ingrained morality (which is not to say that decent people can't be responsible for widespread destruction, as in the Iraq war). He thought, correctly, that the decent and moral thing to do after a terror attack was to draw distinctions between American Muslims and those who committed the 9/11 attacks. The current Republican Party is the opposite. It goes out of its way to conflate ordinary American Muslims with extremists, jihadists, and the like. It revels in this, almost as if it satisfies some subliminal desire — a profoundly pagan, un-Christian one.