Please take note that all across the right wing, the ram's horn is sounding for World War III. And who are we fighting? The Muslim hordes. Not just 19 guys on airliners, not just the ten thousand or so lingering in Afghanistan, nor the fellow traveling Taliban, nor the twenty thousand we recruited in Iraq by our presence -- no, now it's the entire Muslim world, all one billion of them. Oh boy. It's going to be a doozie.

While typical of the unanalytical, Fox News-simplistic right, it is also a big step toward simple bigotry. The grievances of the Arabs surrounding Israel are quite different from the Wahabbist rage against the entire modern world created by the West which Al Qaeda embodies. Lumping all the strains of Muslim political thinking together and writing "threat" across the box is as stereotypical and bigoted as blaming the Jews for everything wrong in Germany a while back.

There is only one reason to lump the three current Muslim hotspots (Iraq, Iran and the Israeli border) together -- that we are on the other side in all three instances. There is a reason for that. If there is any grand conspiracy, it's not among the disparate Muslims, it's among the cabal in the Bush administration. You can read all about it in the documents of PNAC, to which they all belong.

Cheney and the PNAC boys are steering this new crisis so as to make sure we stay in the region in force for the indefinite future -- very much like the Crusaders who eventually got kicked out by the locals.

It is that Crusading spirit more than anything else that will make brothers of Al Qaeda, Hizbollah, Hamas and the Cairo Rotary Club. The PNAC boys welcome it, just as in a former era they welcomed the Cold War. For them, a good war, hot or cold, is better than peace, because it advances many goals or theirs, most involving military occupation for at least a generation.

And if they have to demonize an entire religion to do attain them, so be it.

The Harris poll isn't as bad as you imply. In most categories, judgments about Iraq correspond with the known facts pretty well, even moreso than last year. As for the numbers on Al Qaeda and WMDs, the former has been (somehat mystifyingly) constantly high, while the WMD number has recently surged.

I wish the Harris poll had gone on to ask questions fleshing out the picture, along lines of "Where the hell did you get such boneheaded information?" and "Are you not aware that the Bush administration itself has ADMITTED that there were no WMDs in Iraq?"

I mean, who ARE these poll respondents? Did they just decide to poll in states starting with A, or something?

Or did they just poll Fox News-watchers this time?

I want to know.

I'm amazed at the anti-South vitriol in a few of the messages today. Yes, a majority of Southerners are conservative, and some so far so that they abandon reason and substitute unquestioning religious fanatacism. The only answer is gentle persuasion and higher education. In the meantime, liberals can win elections and pass legislation anytime they can find common cause with centrists. They can do that without BECOMING centrists. It requires work, however.

I agree with Meredith Eugene Hunt that it's unreasonable for pro-choice people to ignore that fetuses are incipient human beings with present manifestations of life. Only time separates them from becoming fully alive human beings. That's gotta count for something.

But I am still behind the Clinton view, that abortion should be legal, safe and rare.

Implicit in that construct is major, aggressive, uncompromising, pervasive support for and availability of birth control and family planning information.

Pro-choice people who are against that need to be called out as religious fanatics, and I include everyone from the pope to Flip Benham.

Better yet, any tax-supported health or family planning agency that refuses to recommend appropriate birth control, and every "conscience clause" allowing pharmacists to refuse to dispense contraceptives, should be the subject of federal litigation under the Religious Establishment clause of the First Amendment.

I also believe that anti-sex counseling of teenagers (and adults for that matter), including uncompromising advocacy of abstinence and support for "virgin pledges", is counterproductive and has been shown to be so, and that young people instead should be encouraged to learn about how to deal with their sexuality responsibly, with a little encouragement to resolve doubt in favor of waiting. Surveys have shown repeatedly that most young people so counseled make wiser choices than their putatively virginal peers.

In fact, I think it's probably true that the more sexual experience you have, the less likely you are to get into undesirable situations. I include with the obvious ones rushing into a committed relationship for which the partners are not suited, sometimes resulting in unwanted children and a whole host of social problems flowing from that.

So make sensible love, not religious propaganda.

This is just way too passively lame for me. The owners have to know you were there and get pissed about it, yet be forced to appreciate the symbolism. Nothing less than dried jizz on the windshield will do it.

I just want to applaud Tom Tomorrow for using this strip to write down the current right-wing propaganda and then puncturing it. His strips are entertaining, but are also a history of lies great and small, juxtaposed with simple truth.

I find myself sending them to my conservative friends on a regular basis and getting silence in return. I think it's because they realize that by repeating the foxnewsisms that are their only arguments, they step into The Modern World, and look ridiculous.