When The Extreme Becomes The Norm

by Christopher Hitchens - June 8th, 2009 - Slate

The same near-masochistic insistence on taking the extreme as the norm was also present in Obama's smoothly delivered speech in the Egyptian capital. Some of what he said was well-intentioned if ill-informed. The United States should not have overthrown the elected government of Iran in 1953, but when it did so, it used bribed mullahs and ayatollahs to whip up anti-Communist sentiment against a secular regime. The John Adams administration in the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli did indeed proclaim that the United States had no quarrel with Islam as such (and, even more important, that the United States itself was in no sense a Christian nation), but the treaty failed to stop the Barbary states from invoking the Quran as permission to kidnap and enslave travelers on the high seas, and thus Thomas Jefferson was later compelled to send a fleet and the Marines to put down the trade. One hopes that Obama does not prefer Adams to Jefferson in this regard.

I find it interesting that only Christopher Hitchens, the one liberal truly dedicated to freedom, seems enraged at the stupid process of letting the most extreme Islamic prisoners take control of life for all prisoneres in our camp at Guantanamo. Hitchens is a liberal, but of the old school. Old style liberals are as dedicated to freedom as conservatives claim to be. Yet this article by Hitchens is the first to note the absolutely stupid process by which we have allowed the most radical of the extremists to use our own prison camps as an indoctrination camp for radical Islam.

Surely this stupidity indicates one reason we are having such difficulty winning this war. Our leaders, from the inarticulate retard George W. Bush, to the Magic Marxist Messiah Barack H. Obama, do not have a clue what it will take to win this war.