America, What a Country

How would you feel if you got a note from your house sitter telling you not to worry about the stuff in your liquor cabinet and your house sitter is Lindsay Lohan?

Even her delinquent friends would snicker and say, "Yeah, right!"

Or imagine in fairy-tale land, writing for the Poultry Gazette, Mr. Phineas J. Phox, has a column decrying the paranoid attitude of the citizens of the hen house toward four-legged, furry-tailed intruders with sharp teeth.

Can anybody say "credibility problem"?

So how is it that Newsweek Magazine can have a Muslim editor chide America about its overreaction to the Islamic threat on U.S. soil?

Oh, we're all down with the fact that Lindsay Lohan is a lush, and we're very clear on the idea that foxes love to gobble up chickens like Kobayashi at an eating competition, but mention that Muslims want to kill us all and take over the country, and we go brain dead.

That and we let life-long Muslims like Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria tell us how to run our country as if we've never heard of 9/11.

From the moment I began reading "Beyond Bush" in the June 11th issue, I was suspicious that a guy named Zakaria thought all of the Republican presidential hopefuls were talking too tough on Islam. I made a mental note to look up Fareed when I got home.

I know, I'm a racist, just like the chickens in the coop are specists, and the homeowner with the killer stash is a worry wort.

But I was also right.

Although he once told The Village Voice that he "was not a religious guy", he was raised in a practicing Islamic home according to Wikipedia, the only source I could find that broached the subject of his religious affiliation.

Oh, foul human that I am! So judgmental, so cruel, so insensitive! Assessing a man solely on his religious background? Egads, call in the thought police!

But wait. What else do I have on which to judge him? If I had something else--a personal relationship--I might think differently. My point is that it is folly to even consider a man with such sympathies a credible source for how we choose to handle a fight for our lives.

That Newsweek Magazine bosses didn't say, "Well, hold on, don't you think Americans will wonder about a Muslim giving advice on Muslims" speaks to Newsweek's pomposity.

That Any American would accept the assessment of someone whose motives bear questioning, shows how scary naive we are.