Stop Me Before I Vote Again

That dirtiest of dirty birds, congressman Peter King of (where else?) Long Island, is working up a little congressional jihad against American Muslims:

Mr. King said ... that Al Qaeda was trying to radicalize Muslims and that its effort was the leading homegrown terrorism threat.

“The threat is coming from the Muslim community,” he said, “the radicalization attempts are directed at the Muslim community.

(By the way, am I the only one who hates this "community" trope? The business community, the gay community, the black community, the bigot community. Why do we have to demote the substantive to an adjectival role and posit some nonexistent "community" for it to modify? Don't we all live in real communities, with, like, streets and sewers? With black people and businessmen and gay people and bigots, crossing paths all the time? But I digress.)

There was a little counter-demo against King's inquisition today, and a sad affair it was. From the same Times story linked above:

In New York, 500 people demonstrated near Times Square to protest the hearings and to call on Mr. King to expand his witness list to include other groups....

Rabbi Marc Schneier, president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding(*), and Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam who is a co-founder of a project to develop an Islamic community center and mosque near ground zero, addressed the crowd.

“To single out Muslim Americans as the source of homegrown terrorism and not examine all forms of violence motivated by extremist belief — that, my friends, is an injustice,” Rabbi Schneier said....

“Everybody I talk to worries about it,” [Democratic Representative] Ellison said during [a] Sunday morning appearance with Mr. King ... on CNN. He added, “It’s absolutely the right thing to do for the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee to investigate radicalization, but to say we’re going to investigate a — a religious minority and a particular one, I think, is the wrong course of action to take.”

Yet for many Muslim leaders, the initial outrage and fear is giving way to a determination to participate in the testimony and shape the outcome. Rizwan Jaka, a board member of the Adams Center here, said leaders of mainstream mosques were eager to testify about their cooperation with law enforcement.

"Include other groups!" The equal-opportunity police state, where Jews and Christians nobly ask to be sat on as hard as Muslims. The rabbi and the Democrat are quite willing to let slip the dogs of Homeland Security, as long as they bite every "community" equally. (If this included the "business community" it might have some appeal; but dream on.)

Where could you find a better example of the stultification and dementedness of conventional high-minded American thinking on the subjects of "extremism", "radicalization", and -- wait for it -- "diversity"?

Compare and contrast. Elsewhere in the world, a lot of people seem to have shaken off these mind-forg'd manacles and are happily being radical, extremist, and so on. When will we catch up?

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(*) How great is that name? "Ethnic understanding". There's some magisterial ambiguity there. Does it mean "understanding ethnicity" -- which would be a great thing, though it might have a somewhat critical and dissolutive tendency with respect to its topic? Or does it mean "understanding things like an ethnic does"? Or "ethnics understanding that other ethnics are also ethnics, with all that that implies, whatever that 'all' might be?" Or something even more subtle?

Ethnic understanding, my ass. What's this a euphemism for?

One can't help wondering: to what ghoulish indignities will the supposed corpse of Osama bin Laden be subjected?

Our robust ancestors exhumed Oliver Cromwell, and drew and quartered him. No doubt they had a whale of a time.

These days, we don't know how to have any fun, or rather, we don't know how to admit that we're having fun when doing so; the drawing-and-quartering will therefore no doubt involve a spanky-clean autopsy suite, a DNA lab, an MRI machine, and a number of individuals with advanced degrees from well-known institutions.

Still and all, though. Mission accomplished, as the current Emperor's predecessor somewhat prematurely said. No doubt all those boots on the ground will be trudging home now -- right?

From Mike Flugennock:

Welcome, folks, to Day One of Obama’s second term.

... Go ahead, America, throw yourselves a goddamn’ party. Enjoy it while you can, before you wake up and realize you’ve still got no job, your house is about to be foreclosed, and you’re about to lose your Medicare and Social Security.

The whack of OBL makes a nice contrast with the Saddam spider hole extraction. Flat out assassination. Period. Total plan A.

Yes, they'd have scooped up his family for a fly-out and a few rounds of the Jane Austen school of interogation -- that is if the second copter hadn't done the fucklebuck with that Tom Swift stealth gyro. But as for himself... nope... whack and dump.

Why not capture the guy like Saddam? Why not show-trial him and execute him good and legal before the eyes of the world, etc., etc.?

Because he's no Saddam, is he? And they know it. He's a beloved and admired jihadist hero of earth wide proportions. And with all the clever Ivy League lawyers a spotlight like that could draw, they prolly couldn't convict of anything beyond intemperate language.

Even in a kangaroo court trying to look like it wasn't a kangaroo court -- even then, the whole damn fool happenin' would quickly turn into an off-off-Broadway production of Trial by Jury ... not the style of our present impresario in chief, Barry Artaud Obama:

Now, Jurymen, hear my advice --
All kinds of vulgar prejudice
I pray you set aside:
With stern judicial frame of mind,
From bias free of every kind
This trial must be tried.

And when amid the plaintiff's shrieks,
The ruffianly defendant speaks,
Upon the other side --
What he may say you needn't mind --
From bias free of every kind
This trial must be tried.

Hell, they're afraid to put my boy Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the John Belushi of the GWOT, on trial! Imagine the fuckus fruckus a trial of the very king of GWOT would bring. Bruno and OJ, move over.

So... whack him and toss him into the choppy deep deep sea. Pure gangsta? No. The mob's gotta do their wet work as black ops -- as, by the way, this could also have been done.

This was a classic show assassination. It's not exactly a new genre; this was only another case in a list longer than Noah's passenger manifest, of big fat terror state performing in public. The domestic list is endless; the wrinkle here might be the sovereign violation aspect.

I hear Lumumba's shade protesting: "Hey, what was I, chopped liver?" This was different -- a public open-air full-credit job by our own hands. The message: Uncle Hedge has a global writ. How? He writ it hizzseff, and big Sam is self-appointed sheriff of Earth County.

I love seeing Dersh all over the place on this: "Show the photos...show the proof he wasn't shot in cold blood... inquiring minds must know the truth... show 'em, show em!" It's simply his fury at a White House unwilling to wave the hit shots around in the faces of Alan's blood enemies, the friends of a liberated Palestine. If Alan had his way, O'Barry would personally drag the corpse around Ground Zero behind a red-white-and-blue Humvee.

Even the Times is laughing at the Mexican-Iranian car salesman terror plot. Even my colleagues in the sweatshop are laughing at it. There's a video monitor there, in the bullpen, playing CNN 24/7, and this relentless bombardment of coarse propaganda has lowered their resistance to obvious nonsense. But even so, they can't swallow this one. They just laugh.

Who does Eric Holder remind me of?

This face is very evocative. Oddly enough, there's a touch of Ralph Nader in it, and a touch of Yogi Bear, and a bit of Charlie Chaplin, but I'm still off target. There's something about the disposition of eyebrows and mustache that tugs at my mental sleeve, and I feel so tremulously close to recovering it -- and yet it hasn't surfaced. I think it's a cartoon character. Is it Shenzi, from the Lion King? --

-- though Shenzi, to do him justice, didn't have a vile caterpillarish coplike mustache.