Sometimes it seems that the entire nation is in an extended sitcom argument. You know how these arguments go: one spouse initiates a discussion about family finances by saying something like, "Honey, does this VISA bill look right to you?" The other changes the subject by responding, "How dare you say that about my mother!"

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Well, that's how America conducts important debates in our post-9/11 world. We can't get to any of the deeper issues confronting the country because we're too busy arguing about whether we like our mother-in-law.

An example: Last week the 9/11 commission finally came to New York to do what it does best--raise important issues of leadership that end up getting bogged down in hurt feelings and political finger-pointing.

The main discussion centered on the city's response to the unfolding disaster on that clear September morning and whether certain well-documented failures resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths.

This is a no-brainer. Everyone knows that firefighters and cops responding to the attack were unable to communicate with each other because they use different radio systems. Everyone knows that firefighters on the upper floors of the north tower never heard the order to evacuate immediately. Everyone knows that 9-1-1 operators lacked information and were unable to tell callers what to do.

Given all that, John F. Lehman, a member of the commission and a former Navy secretary under President Ronald Reagan, thrust himself into a standard sitcom scenario. "The command and control and communications of this city's public service is a scandal," he said. "It's not worthy of the Boy Scouts, let alone this great city." In response, city officials and the local press played right into the script: "How dare you say our dead firefighters and cops aren't heroes!"

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But no one ever said anything of the sort. The firefighters and cops who ran into the burning Twin Towers to save the lives of strangers are the true heroes of our War on Terror (even more-so than heroes like the late NFL football player Pat Tillman, who opted to leave sports to fight in Afghanistan--in my opinion, heeding our nation's idiotic dictum of "an eye for an eye"--but that's a rant for another day).

But just as at Abu Ghraib or at Tora Bora, New York's leaders failed our nearly 400 dead heroes. Pointing that out is not unpatriotic, it's vital.

Anyone willing to listen to the rest of the discussion last week would have seen why. By opening up this old wound, we learned that New York City firefighters are still using the same radio system that failed on 9/11. We also learned that New York still lacks a plan for which agency--the NYPD or the FDNY--will take charge in catastrophic emergencies.

To any reasonable New Yorker, this is unbelievable. New York's "battles of the badges" are legendary. Go through the clips at any of the city's papers, and you'll read pages and pages of stories describing how cops and firefighters converged on some minor disaster site and how someone ended up bloody. Just last week, the city held a drill to highlight how well all the various agencies were finally working together. In the drill, which simulated a terror attack on the subway, cops and firefighters did what they do best--respond to the attack with rare heroism. Unfortunately, at least one officer and fireman didn't get the memo about working together: The cop tackled the firefighter to prevent him from entering the station. Rules, he said.

The New York example is far from the first time that debate over serious issues has been side-stepped. From the moment that President Bush's spokesman Ari Fleischer told Americans to "watch what they say and watch what they do," the message has been clear: Any attempt to have a forthright discussion of America's direction would be seen as un-American.

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Remember how everyone who questioned the subsequent invasion of Iraq was tagged as "unpatriotic"? Never mind that there remain serious questions about the president's stated reasons for taking on Iraq: the weapons of mass destruction threat, the unproven connection to al Qaeda, that we'd be treated as liberators once Saddam Hussein was deposed, that it would be quick, that it would set off a domino effect of democracy across the Middle East. Even now, opponents of the war are derided as anti-American whenever they question our shoddy administration of that war.

Take, for example, when President Bush used images of flag-draped coffins coming out of Ground Zero for two campaign ads. Instead of a genuine debate over the president's handling of terrorism--from the eight months before 9/11 to three years after it--we got the sitcom debate about whether it was appropriate to use such iconic imagery in a political ad.

The non-debate debate continued a few months later when a man named Russ Kick published pictures on his Web site of America's flag-draped coffins coming home from Iraq. Sure, it created a stir, but instead of a real debate over why there were so many dead Americans in coffins at all, the country got mired in the sitcom debate over whether we should be allowed to see such images.

And then we had the Abu Ghraib pictures, which comprise nothing less than an international scandal that has, fairly or unfairly, undermined America's leadership in the world. But instead of having an open discussion of our post-invasion shortcomings, the mother-in-law sitcom sketch began anew. One side asks how something like this could happen and the other side responds, "How dare you demean America's heroic soldiers!"

The New York City terror-attack drill showed that some of the problems from 9/11 have yet to be resolved between New York City's finest and bravest. But the rhetoric last week didn't begin a frank discussion; it began days of diversion. Cue the laugh track. Fade out.

Gersh Kuntzman is also Brooklyn Bureau Chief for The New York Post. His website is at http://www.gersh.tv

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