Go ahead: ask. Ask any Liberal, “Progressive” or Democrat.

They’ll tell you: the war on terror is a hoax. Usual buzzwords: Bush. Cheney. Halliburton. Lies. No WMD. Not a real President. Standard fare.

Air America: the war is false. Islam is fine. Randi Rhoads: Bush brought down the towers themselves. Rosie: the Twin Towers were demo’d; everyone knows fire can’t melt steel. Just ask SFFD and anyone who responded to the tanker fire at the Maze a little over a week ago.

There are no terror cells. The war on terror is fabricated. The only danger facing America is that manufactured by the Bush Administration. Islam is the religion of peace, tolerance and understanding.

From AP News:

Six foreign-born Muslims were arrested and accused Tuesday of plotting to attack Fort Dix and slaughter scores of U.S. soldiers – a scheme the FBI says was foiled when the men asked a store clerk to copy a video of them firing assault weapons and screaming about jihad.

This information screaming from the front pages of every newspaper in America? Way to go, FBI? Let’s hand it to law enforcement? A “win” for domestic intelligence? Keep it up? Words like these plastered above the fold nationally?

No.

USA Today, Tuesday morning, first referred to the suspects as Muslims THEN removed their nationality from the internet.

Bottom line? There is NO credible continuing threat and Islam needs more acceptance:

It doesn’t matter to me whether I get locked up, arrested or get taken away,” another defendant, Serdar Tatar, was alleged to have said. “Or I die, it doesn’t matter. I’m doing it in the name of Allah.”

Perhaps its time for Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to demand an investigation into the unseen hands of Bush & Cheney pulling the puppet strings of these six innocent and clearly-framed men.

After 9-11, everything changed.

Prior to that date, what did you happen to hear, much less care to hear, about Islam?

After 9-11, most everything seemed then, and now, to revolve around Islam.

When did we have to “understand” Islam? Before? No.

When did we have to prop CAIR into the forefront? Before? No.

When you’re Muslim and it’s time for prayer, you have to wash your feet? It is called “ablution.” So foot-washing basins make it easier for Muslims instead of sticking their feet into sinks. The Kansas City International Airport has added washing stations to the bathrooms to prepare the Muslim taxicab drivers for their prayers.

Alcohol is forbidden by Islam and dogs are considered “unclean.”

The cost of the KC project is not known. “This is a touchy subject,” said the Chief of Police of the Kansas City Airport Police.

Taxpayers are going to have to foot the bill because Muslims are demanding foot-washing basins.

Why are we constructing places of worship for them inside our airports?” said an airport official who requested anonymity. “Why are we catering to their rituals? We don’t do it for any other religion.”

Really? No shit.

The Islamic purification ritual, known in Arabic as “wudu,” involves a 10-step process, which includes:

1. Praising Allah while washing both hands up to the wrist three times, making sure that the water reaches between fingers and under rings.
2. Rinsing out the mouth thoroughly three times, using the right hand (the one not used for cleaning private parts) to bring the water to the mouth.
3. Snorting water into the nostrils from the right hand, three times, to cleanse them of demons that Muslims believe reside there, clearing the passages of any mucous using the left hand.
4. Washing off the tip of the nose with the left hand.
5. Washing the entire face three times from right ear to left ear.
6. Continuing to wash from forehead to throat.
7. Washing the right arm and then the left arm, three times, from the wrist up to the elbow, removing watches.
8. Moving wetted palms over the head from the top of the forehead to the back of the head.
9. Passing the wetted tips of the fingers into the grooves and holes of both ears, and also passing the wetted thumbs behind the ears and ear lobes.
10. Finally, washing both feet to the ankles starting with the right foot, including between the toes, then reciting: “Ash-hadu an la ilaha illal lahu wa ashhadu anna Muammadan ‘abduhu wa rasuluh” – meaning there is no god but Allah and he has no partners, and Muhammad is his servant and messenger.

Islamists are our ENEMIES. Not Catholics. Not Jews. Not Buddhists.

I know: let’s just place a nice Kimber .45 right to our collective national temples.

How ignorant are we?

— Dennis Miller, on his radio show, Saturday, May 5th

I collect American Patriotic Art, primarily from WWI and WWII eras. When I can think of it, I’ll post portions of my collection on my Sunday entries.

Today happens to be an excursion in stream-of-consciousness writing. Before starting this post I traveled all over the internet and visited the blogs of my Usual Suspects. I also poured myself a generous Stolichnaya & Squirt (not good for the liver but, after 50+ years, cancer, 30+ years at my job, life in general, two wives, one lengthy and costly girlfriend, what the hell), opened the upstairs window and let the gusting wind into my house.

It rained like hell yesterday. Now, it’s extremely windy, blue and clear skies, the tops of the pines bending and waving. My property is peppered with huge pines and some deciduous trees with actual leaves, shining mint green in the direct sunlight amongst the dappled shadows. The ends of the firs and pines have their newer lighter green growths; that means the ubiquitous yellow pine pollen isn’t far away from making its slathering and sneezy appearance.

A gust has come up; the wind rushes through my open window and, now, everything bends east under a huge gust, making noise like the finest digital movie soundtrack.

Rush has a new studio album out entitled Snakes & Arrows. It’s on my $1,000 Bose Wave radio, about the size of a gray briefcase. At one time I had a $10,000+ stereo system. These days, with my ears gone from years of being clasped in headphones whilst broadcasting in radio, and from attending literally hundreds of live concerts in the 70s, a briefcase radio is about all I can appreciate. Anything more acute is largely wasted on my smarting eardrums. But still I find music soothes my soul and its patterns calm my tremors.

I listen to Rush now whilst I write this; mixed with nature’s massive and beautiful wind with bended trees.

Today was something of a Threshold Day. That is, having traveled to and fro around the world and experiencing various digital domains, I declared that I had had enough.

Have you ever had one of those days? I am experiencing that day right now, here and now, as I write this post. I write in frustration, in exasperation, wondering, wondering, wondering: where is this all going? Where is my country? Where is what I have known?

Change is eternal; we all know that. But like a latter-day Alvin Toffler I wonder: how can we collectively continue to process change at the rate to which it occurs and demands our obeisance?

Some days it just seems too much, too past threshold, too crazy, too chaotic, too MUCH. Today, for me, is such a day.

Good is the subject of attack on every front, at every level. Common sense is geometrically uncommon. Sensory gain is over 10. I am overstimulated and underchallenged. Facts are immaterial. Emotions rule all. Feelings trump logic. I am pummeled and assaulted and beaten and blackened by despots who wish to minimize or remove my country’s Constitution, abrogate its Bill of Rights and ignore its Amendments, consider its laws as obstructions.

I know I can’t give up. I know I must continue to post. I know I must continue to expose the inanities, inequities, insanities posed by our new world and those on both ends:

Those from within who will push every frontier, every border, for complete and total acceptance of everything and everyone until an actual socialist or communist nation emerges;

Government Uber Alles! Sieg Heil!

Those from without who seek to turn this nation into another Islamist state or who, at minimum, seek to humble, defang, excoriate, minimize, embarrass or turn this mighty nation into a whipped and whining dog begging for scraps at the global table.

Imagine what this continent, this WORLD would be like had not the United States the strength, the might, the BALLS to intervene in any number of global conflicts.

A humble sentence comes to my brain now:

Except: our enemies, within and without, are completely aware of what it is they do.

Despising America:

The fanatical Muslims despise America because it’s all lapdancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise America because it’s all born-again Christians hung up on abortion; the anti-Semites despise America because it’s controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too Christian, too Godless, America is also too isolationist, except when it’s too imperialist.

Too Christian, too Godless, too isolationist, too imperialist, too seductive, too cretinous, America is George Orwell’s Room 101: whatever your bugbear, you will find it therein – for the Continentals, excessive religiosity; for the Muslims, excessive decadence; for Harold Pinter, excessively bleeding rectums.

Mark Steyn — all 6’7″ of him — from “The Daily Telegraph”

Give me logic and clarity any day.