I think I have covered this before.

I am sick to death of the conflict between radical Islamism and Western culture being treated as though this was an argument over a favorite color, or what you like on pizza, and one opinion is as valid as any other. We are not talking about whether one should eat pork or not, or take Saturday off, or wear certain clothes. We are talking about whether it is right to blow a woman's brains out for showing an ankle, or stone one to death for adultery.

This is blatantly false. The values of the United States and the Western world are by any standards that can be applied by reasonable human beings superior to the values of the Taliban or other radical Islamists, and anyone who tries to tell you it's wrong to judge between the two is trying to pull something on you.

When a group of people in the southern United States decided that one group of people was inferior because of their ancestry, this was not treated as "just another opinion." or a "way of life." Lives were at stake. And the rest of the nation corrected this. Using armed force in some cases. Some people bitched about "state's rights." They were overridden.

It amazes me that leftists who can barely let a day go by without lambasting conservatives for their supposed and largely fictional Neanderthal attitudes about women, minorities, sexual mores, and all the rest of their "tired old ethics." Then they can turn around and defend Islamic thugs who actually make this behavior their life's work.

We're right. They're wrong. This conclusion is impossible for a leftist to understand--most have trouble wrapping their brains around the idea of judging between right and wrong in the first place--but it's true.

"Promethean violence?" The author is not talking about military invasion, he's talking about an invasion of ideas. And he calls this violence. Anyone remember who Prometheus was, and what he did? Civilization and individual rights as a threat? Only totalitarians would see this as such. The author calls our bases a cultural threat. If it hadn't been the bases, it would have been our magazines, our TV shows, or something. Our very existence and world influence threatens the fundamentalists, and it would have been no different in a modern technological world if Americans had no troops outside the U.S. at all.

And I bet more than a few more thoughtful liberals agree with me.