Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

The media and the Muslim mobs

Mark Steyn:

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In a way, both the U.S. media and those wacky rioters in the Afghan-Pakistani hinterlands are very similar: two highly parochial and monumentally self-absorbed tribes isolated from the rest of the world and prone to fanatical irrational indestructible beliefs — not least the notion you can flush a 950-page book down one of Al Gore's eco-crazed federally-mandated low-flush toilets, a claim no editorial bigfoot thought to test for himself in Newsweek's executive washroom.
Watching the media circle the wagons around the beleaguered Mr. Isikoff this week, Martin Peretz of the New Republic described them as "a profession that is complacent, self-righteous, and hopelessly in love with itself." The media are the message: But, hey, enough about the war, let's talk about me.
As for the wackiness of Muslim fanatics, well, up to a point. But, you know, we've been told ever since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the allegedly seething "Muslim street" was about to explode and for four years it remained as somnolent as a suburban cul-de-sac on a weekday afternoon.
Invade their countries, topple their rulers, bomb their infrastructure from the first day of Ramadan to the last, arrest their terrorists, hold them at Gitmo for half a decade, initiate reforms setting the Arab world on the first rung of the ladder to political and economic liberty... and the seething Muslim street gives one almighty shrug.
In October 2001, Faizal Aqtub Siddiqi, president-general of the International Muslims Organization, warned that the bombing of Afghanistan would create 1,000 bin Ladens. In April 2003, Egypt's President Mubarak warned the bombing of Iraq would create 100 bin Ladens.
So right there you had a 90 percent reduction in the bin Laden creation program — just by bombing a second country. Despite the best efforts to rouse the Muslim street, its attitude has remained: Start the jihad without me. The short history of the last four years is: They're nuts but not that nuts.
Until, that is, Newsweek's story of Koran-flushing prompted bloody riots from Yemen to Afghanistan to Indonesia. To get a rise out of these guys, it took a peculiarly vivid combination of disrespect — the literal word of Allah plus the flush toilet, a quintessential symbol of Western decadence to the remoter parts of the Hindu Kush. Message to George W. Bush: You can do anything but lay off of my Holy Book.