For such a reasoned thinker, Susan Sontag’s inspired some awfully dumb obits. My biggest beef is with the accusation that Sontag’s post-9/11 essays offered “backhanded praise for the hijackers.” No, no, no. All she did was say they weren’t “cowards.” A suicide bomber isn’t a coward. A zealous, misguided, homicidal maniac, but not a “coward.” That’s not praise, backhanded or not. It’s intellectual rigor, a quest for more precise definitions and analyses of the world around us. That’s something the US, and the world at large, could always use a lot more of.