In a September 21 Ace of Spades HQ post, blogger Ace quoted reports which said that President Obama told Bob Woodward that "[w]e can absorb a terrorist attack. We'll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever ... we absorbed it and we are stronger," and claimed:

A little context here. The Obama and the leftist media will attempt to spin this as merely descriptive, and as a tribute to America's resiliency. After all -- we did survive 9/11, didn't we? (Well, actually, 2996 of us did notsurvive 9/11, but apart from them, we survived.)

This is merely Obama talking up America's capacity to endure, they will say.

But it's not. This is a meme that has been circulating on the left for quite a while, usually secretly and among themselves only, but sometimes, ill-advisedly, being pushed out into public as a trial balloon.

Ace went on to say that Obama and the “leftist media” “will spin this, but this is what Obama is getting at, what the left is constantly saying, but which leftist politicians are careful never to say publicly: for the good of relations with the Muslim world we're just going to have to be mature about mass murder.”