I don't know if you've all been following the architectural plans for ground zero here in Manhattan . I have, closely. I care about architecture, I care about New York City , and I look over the empty site from our office windows.

The last time I talked about this on the show, around a year ago, I found myself feeling surprisingly optimistic, almost giddy. In particular, I was thrilled by the renderings of Santiago Calatrava's gorgeous, soaring, white steel train station for the site.

Then last fall they announced that Frank Gehry would build a performing arts center and that a world-class Norwegian firm would design the freedom museum.

My hopes soared.

Silly me.

The future of ground zero is now a dispiriting mess. Let me tick off my ticked-offed-ness one fiasco at a time.

First, the Freedom Tower , the giant office high-rise that's supposed to replace the World Trade towers and prove to the world that we won't let terrorists defeat us. They've just redesigned it yet again, for the third time.

It is still insanely tall, almost twice as high as the Empire State Building , and thus a shiny new #1 target for terrorists around the world.

And as architecture it's as banal as ever, which a building this gigantic is almost doomed to be. But even worse, now it's been designed to withstand bombs – by making the lower 20 floors this looming 200-foot-tall fortress of solid, windowless concrete. Won't that be an uplifting presence?

What about that glorious train terminal? The scuttlebutt is it's probably too expensive to build as designed.

Frank Gehry's complex of theaters? That project has been shelved.

And then there's the museum, known as the International Freedom Center . The Norwegian architects finished their handsome design a couple of months ago. And ever since, the project has been a political football. An unholy know-nothing alliance of the city's tabloid papers and New York's governor and some of the survivors of 9/11 victims have decided it might become a venue for dangerous "anti-American" sentiment.

Why? Because a few left-wing academics are involved in planning the Freedom Museum. And because -- hypothetically, someday, maybe –its exhibits on the struggle for freedom might mention unpleasant historical facts like, say, slavery, or the internment of Japanese-Americans. And because the work to be displayed in an adjacent art gallery could be -- conceivably, someday, maybe, with artists you never know –unpatriotic.

What a load of pathetic and cynical and – yes -- anti-American demagoguery.

I mean, isn't the point of American freedom that we're plenty strong and self-confident enough to expose ourselves all sorts of ideas and images? And wasn't the terrorist attack on ground zero perpetrated by people whose standard response to upsetting art and ideas is to demonize and ban them? And aren't we supposed to be better?

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