– The Taliban waged a brutal war on drugs – executing users as well as traffickers, eventually ridding the country of the heroin trade. They held and· practiced deep fundamentalist religious convictions. They believed all their problems would be solved if everyone just went to the same church. They supported prayer in schools. They believed women were best off barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. They instituted a brutal crackdown on crime that instilled so much abject fear in their subjects that the streets of Kabul became as safe as the streets of Singapore. (Did they learn this from Rudy Giuliani or he from them?)
Who’s the most dangerous man in the world today? I can tell you one thing for sure – it’s not Osama bin Laden. That pathetic asshole is scruffling around the rocks and bushes in the high desert, freezing his ass off.
Soon he will be brought down by the braying staghounds of the mightiest war machine in history. Great plan, Mr. O- man. Crash loaded passenger planes into office buildings – yeah, that will really get world opinion on the side of your warped and perverted view of Islam. Osama is just another run-of-the-mill nutcase.
I wonder if John Ashcroft doesn’t harbor a tinge of regret that he has helped wage a war on a group with the exact same values as his. At least he can learn from their methods as he institutes his jihad against civil liberties here in America. That skin color and theological phraseology can make bitter enemies of identical spirits attests to the shallowness of both the Taliban’s and Mr. Ashcroft’s ideologies.
I’ve heard it said that “the liberal is afraid of every known phenomenon” I think it can also be said that “the conservative is afraid of every unknown phenomenon.” Since unknown phenomena are infinite, conservatives are more dangerous. Liberals may be fools, but conservatives can be downright scary. Conservatives are busily convincing the American people that some terrorist hobgoblin lurks behind every bush. If you don’t believe this just read The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan raving about 25-year-old “Arab men” and snitching off her neighbors to the FBI because they take pictures of national landmarks (it must be that the shutters are clicked by brown fingers that makes this so insidious in her mind). See http:/ /opinionjournal.com/ columnists/pnoonan/?id=95001349 if you think I exaggerate.
Thankfully, the American people, as always, show far more sense then the pundits on the left or right. The economy edges forward, our confidence returns and the feeble bleating of those of us more worried about the excess of our own government than any foreign threat are at least not ridiculed, even if not entirely heeded. That Osama bin· Laden and John Ashcroft will both visit upon us their particular flavors of state-sponsored terrorism makes for a bleak few years, but this too shall pass and we can get on with our lives and loves and hopefully make some small progress for the cause of liberty in the new millennium.