Biden to attend Ground Zero 9/11 memorial ceremony for 25th anniversary

Twenty-five years is the kind of anniversary that used to bring everybody to the same spot, no matter what side of the aisle they landed on. So there's nothing strange about Biden showing up at Ground Zero. Former presidents go. That's just how it works, and it should keep working that way regardless of who's in office now.

But it's worth noticing how thin the actual reporting here is. We get a spokesperson confirming attendance to a sister network, and that's it. No word on remarks, no word on who else will be there, nothing about how the current administration is marking the day. For an anniversary this significant, the coverage feels like an afterthought stapled onto a bigger news cycle. That's a shame, because 9/11 deserves more than a confirmation blurb.

What we'd actually like to see is less jockeying over who shows up where and more honesty about where the country stands a quarter century later. The attacks united Americans for a stretch that now looks almost quaint. Since then we've had two decades of wars people stopped believing in, a homeland security bureaucracy that grew way past its original mission, and a political class that treats solemn dates as photo-op calendars. Biden attending is fine. Whether anyone in Washington still remembers what that day actually demanded of the country is the harder question, and it's not one a press confirmation can answer.