It’s simple really: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Well, this essay – The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt was written more than 50 years ago:

He sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world — for instance, in the Orient — cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed.

Lets see, Mao and Stalin, who commanded huge armies and massacred tens of millions of people are..less dangerous than a country who may be, at the most, responsible for several hundred deaths in Iraq? Right..

The Soviets had enough nuclear firepower to destroy every major city in the US in less than an hour. Iran is at least five years away from getting one nuclear bomb and Pakistan has some nukes but, no long range misses. This is not to belittle the possibility of Nuclear or Biological terror. But, horrible as these possibilities are, our civilization can survive them.

We have better technology, better politics and a stronger economy than they do.

The Islamic world in the present day, is very divided. There is no unified leadership there such as existed during the time of the Crusades.

The bitter irony that many of those on the right seem to have to faith in the strength and resiliency of the American people or in the West as a whole.

It’s okay to be gay as long as you don’t expect to get married, adopt, will your property or assets to your partner-who-is-not-your-spouse, have the right not to be fired because you are gay…
Basically, it’s okay to be gay as long as you never, ever mention it.

It depends on how you define feminism. Anti-abortionists ‘speak to the interests of other women’ but that does not make them feminists. I think of feminism as the recognition that women have equal rights and should have equal legal opportunities as men and that they should not be judged based on their sexuality in ways that men are not so judged (e.g., “she’s smart but she’s over-weight so I don’t want to hire her; he’s smart and over-weight but that’s ok for a guy, so let’s hire him,” leaving aside for now the illegitimacy of weight-based evaluation).

But read some of the comments recorded here by purported feminists.

• “Shared anatomy is not shared values. . . . I’m sorry but Condoleeza Rice is a man in a woman’s suit.”

• “I’d love to see a woman in office in the United States of America. However, the term woman comes first. Not one of the boys. I think Hillary has to remove herself from being one of the boys.”

• “Unfortunately… we have now come to identify women and power not as the radicalization of the mechanism and definition of power, but instead women climbing to the top of the current patriarchy and bureaucratic hierarchy at any cost.”

• “Now, again-there are some women who view power the way men do. But generally speaking, women do it differently.”

They clearly mean something more than equal rights and non-sexual judgments. In the view represented by these quotes, “strong woman” is not equal to “feminist” because a feminist must view power differently than Condi Rice or HRC.

On gay polemicists, one could have supported more funding and treatment for HIV/AIDS while opposing ACT UP-style militancy. One can oppose public expressions of sexuality of whatever stripe, as many conservative gays and straights do (and I do not), without opposing private sexuality of whatever stripe. None of this means that people like Coulter make such fine-grained arguments.

That said, I’m at a loss for leftists who make “common cause” with Islamic fundamentalist. Leftists opposed to US foreign policy have not embraced the Iranian or Saudi regimes’ domestic repression. If you have in mind the Marglin’s v. Sen/Nussbaum/Hobsbawm debate, that’s another matter entirely.

Mark Russell’s version of the same is much better!

Our secret’s out! Quick, to the argosies!

Shurely shome mishtake!

Islamo-Spanish!!