Lee Harris, in a long but fascinating essay, says we aren’t at war with radical Islamists in the conventional sense. We should view them more as a virulent disease that must be wiped out. Despite the harsh sound of this in speaking about fellow human beings, it rings pretty true to me.

After all, as he says:

…Bush?s critics argued, the term ?evildoers? dehumanizes our enemy. And again, the critics are both right and wrong. Yes, the term does dehumanize our enemy. But this is only because our enemy has already dehumanized himself. A characteristic of fantasy ideology is that those in the throes of it begin by dehumanizing their enemies by seeing in them only objects to act upon. It is impossible to treat others in this way without dehumanizing oneself in the process. The demands of the fantasy ideology are such that it transforms all parties into mere symbols. The victims of the fantasy ideology inevitably end by including both those who are enacting the fantasy and those upon whom the fantasy is enacted ? both those who perished in the World Trade Center and those who caused them to perish; and, afterwards, both those who wept for the dead and those who rejoiced over the martyrs.

[via Charles Johnson]

Now the Saudis say that opposition to them in the US is being fomented by extreme Christians.

Well, at least they’re not trying to pin it all on the Jews this time…

Researchers have come up with atomic-scale memory.

It’s gonna be tough to get much denser than that.

UPI says that Bush has been given an invasion plan.

I don’t know whether to believe it or not, though. It could be a leak, or disinformation.

An LA Times reporter was fired for sending an insulting email, using the paper’s mail server. (Note the liberal hate speech, per the Professor’s and others’ comments today.)

Here’s the email:

Congressman Thomas,

Surely, you can?t be that stupid.

I mean, even for the standards of the current Republican Party, which has turned from the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt into a hateful, dogmatic and uncompromising group (except in the case of big business, when you become the party of Stepin Fetchit), your comments on CNN are so completely out of line, they defy logic.

To blame Bill Clinton (our last legally elected president) for the current corporate shenanigans completely flies in the face of truth and logic. The president you and your ilk impeached for lying about oral sex presided over a country that lowered teen pregnancy rates 22 percent, dropped the crime rate by roughly the same amount and knocked nearly half the welfare recipients off the rolls. While those numbers were dropping, so were the numbers in divorce, teen drinking, teen suicide and abortion.

But that doesn?t jibe with your partisan rantings. Everything?s Clinton?s fault, from your faulty perceptions about this country?s moral laxity to the state of the military ? which was cut to pieces by George Bush I and his secretary of defense ? Dick Cheney.

Without a scintilla of regret or moral thought, your party has embraced corporate crooks, polluters and other moral rot. It wasn?t Bill Clinton who cooked books at Enron, Global Crossing, Worldcom and who knows how many other companies.

It wasn?t Bill Clinton who engaged in accounting fraud while working as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company (see Cheney, Dick). It wasn?t Bill Clinton who engaged in insider trading while leading yet another company into bankruptcy (see Bush, G.W.).

It was Bill Clinton who lied about a blow job. Somehow, I don?t see the comparison. Then again, I?m not a morally bankrupt Republican congressman who opts for partisanship ahead of truth.

Respectfully yours,

Brian Robin
Lancaster, CA

I don’t know what’s the big deal. I mean, it is the LA Times.

He shouldn’t have been fired–with howling idiocies like this, he should have been promoted to the editorial page.

As Nelson would say.

Herr Schroeder is behind in the polls, and German unemployment just went up. His waffling on Iraq probably isn’t helping, either.

The political fortunes of the left continue to decline in Europe.

The Libertarian Party continues to dig their own political grave.

Will Warren is experimenting with a new form: rhyming haiku. They’re good.

Sean O’Keefe, the new NASA Administrator, is one of the people being rumored to take over the Department of Homeland Security. I hope that doesn’t happen. If so, it will show just how inconsequential civil space is to this administration.

Greg Hlatky has stumbled onto the Clinton plan to separate the terrorists from their assets.