It's about time the grandmothers of injured military personnel were taken down a notch or two. And the fart joke was a final stroke of brilliance.

Have mercy on my misguided soul, O Enlightened Western LIberals. I already said that you convinced me.

Send me a postcard from Beirut when you move there, Glenn.

Indeed, I look forward to hearing from all the fine folks on this forum when they're writing about the hatred and intolerance of Western Civilization (especially President of the Hateful and Intolerant United States, Barack Hussein Obama) from their new residences in Esfahan, Peshawar, Sana'a (I hear they've got a burgeoning underground gay scene!), and Al Karak.

Those places are just as diverse and tolerant as Alabama, no more and no less. I'm convinced.

British and American culture are exactly as religiously bigoted and intolerant as Islamic culture.

I expect Glenn to pack up his suitcases and move from that awful Catholic hellhole In Rio de Janeiro to Islamabad any day now. Because they're 100% morally equivalent.

And I'm sure you'll follow, right? Let us know how Sharia law and dynastic pseudo-Caliphates work out for your Western liberal sensibilities.

Thanks for educating me. Later

I have spent time in the active-duty US military and am quite familiar with Muslim cultures, and I can only say that anyone comparing the treatment of homosexuals within the two is a damned ignorant fool. An openly homosexual man in Pakistan can consider himself lucky if he is not tortured before he is executed (same with females who do not submit to the men in their families). An openly homosexual man in the US military gets an Other-Than-Honorable discharge and a plane ticket home. Seriously, grow up.

And I am calling Glenn "dishonest" because I know he is quite intelligent, and the level of commentary he is engaging in here is quite beyond "disingenuous."

...intolerance towards homosexuals, women, religious minorities, etc. in Alabama is as bad as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, etc. I truly don't know what to say to you. I can't believe that you're that ignorant of reality, so I have to assume you're being deliberately dishonest. Have you ever actually been to Alabama? Yes, there is bigotry in the American South, but they don't hang seventeen year-old girls for being gang-raped in Mobile or Muskogee.

Isn't your land of "liberated lifestyle"--Brazil--home to one of the largest Catholic populations in the world?

And by the way, nowhere in that article does Douthat even remotely suggest that he favors any kind of conflict with Islam--his article is descriptive, not normative. The most he could be accused of is using loaded terminology.

I normally like your column quite a bit, but you're being intellectually dishonest in the extreme here.

That's why other "developed countries" have worse economies and less social mobility than the US (oh, but you should see the way their oligarchs live! truly fabulous).

Don't worry, we're "catching up" to the rest of the world.

Benedict's Regensburg address supposedly "criticizing Islam" merely mentioned a historical conversation between a Byzantine emperor and a Persian intellectual, and the whole point of the Pope's speech was that violence has no place in the advancing of religion (to which Muslims responded with global riots).

If you really want to engage in some comparative cultural studies, go to a Muslim country and talk about your long-term, loving homosexual relationship, or try and open a Christian (or Jewish!) house of worship in a Muslim country.

Western culture is not perfect, but you're engaging in the worst kind of moral equivalency.

You're an idiot.

America was not presented with two choices, America produced two choices. And the difference between those choices was negligible, as is now clear to all who have eyes to see and ears to hear. America does not want choice, nor deviation from the path of perpetual war and institutionalized aristocracy. That is what America wants and that is what America gets, year after year and election after election, under two different brand names.

I'm not complaining about that. I'm only bemused by the hysterical screeching of the malcontents on this letters forum, who will undoubtedly spend the next lifetime blaming Bush and Cheney for the way America is (the Reagan-bashers having grown too old and having long since retired to their clouds of pot smoke or positions on talk radio or in the Obama administration), long after a Democratic president and Democratic legislative majority have failed to bring the change we were all supposed to believe in.

What am I doing to change anything? Not much, because I'm fine with life in America. I'm doing the same thing as you: relaxing at home and writing letters on the internet.

Cheney forced Obama to vote for the bail-out, forced Obama to keep Bush's Secretary of Defense, forced Obama to appoint Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff, forced Obama to stack the "Treasury" Department and Federal "regulatory" agencies with more Goldman Sachs cronies and corporate patrons, forced Obama to escalate the Afghanistan occupation....etc.

Yes, yes....it's Cheney's world and Obama's just a squirrel trying to get a nut.

Yes, yes....ReThuglican this and DemonRat that. Very good.

Nixon actually got us out of a war.

The same Obama who continues--nay, escalates--all the "war-mongering" policies of the Bush years, replete with torture, indefinite detention, Bush's Secretary of Defense, more troops to Afghanistan, etc.

What a bunch of bleating sheep. The Democratic majority will be out on their keisters in a few short years, with nothing to show for it but a bunch of high-paying lobbyist gigs for all the ex-legislators. Maybe we should put Obama's face on Mt. Rushmore, as an aspirational gesture that will inspire him to someday actually change....something.