The President held a press conference in the sparkling new James S. Brady Briefing Room to address rumors that the Iraq war has been lost. Bush is such an honorable genuinely nice guy that it pained us to watch him barbecued slowly on a rotating spit. With Helen Thomas back in the front seat, which she temporarily lost due to renovations, the heat was turned up a notch. Her statement / question:

Q: Mr. President, you started this war, a war of your choosing, and you can end it alone, today, at this point — bring in peace keepers, U.N. peace keepers. Two million Iraqis have fled their country as refugees. Two million more are displaced. Thousands and thousands are dead. Don’t you understand, you brought the al Qaeda into Iraq

Yes, don’t you understand? You idiot! Now, that is hilarious. The loony senile dimwitted repulsive Ms. Thomas thinks President Bush is dumb and evil. Every time we hear her speak our eyes wander in search of the white coats coming to take her back to the institution.

Bush, shaken by her contemptuous tone and accusatory proclamations, reacted feebly. His response was so lame it made us cringe.

THE PRESIDENT: Actually, I was hoping to solve the Iraqi issue diplomatically. That’s why I went to the United Nations and worked with the United Nations Security Council, which unanimously passed a resolution that said disclose, disarm or face serious consequences. That was the message, the clear message to Saddam Hussein. He chose the course.

Q: Didn’t we go into Iraq?

THE PRESIDENT: It was his decision to make. Obviously, it was a difficult decision for me to make, to send our brave troops, along with coalition troops, into Iraq. I firmly believe the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power. Now the fundamental question facing America is will we stand with this young democracy, will we help them achieve stability, will we help them become an ally in this war against extremists and radicals that is not only evident in Iraq, but it’s evident in Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories and Afghanistan.

We’re at the beginning stages of a great ideological conflict between those who yearn for peace and those who want their children to grow up in a normal, decent society, and radicals and extremists who want to impose their dark vision on people throughout the world. Iraq is obviously — Helen, it’s got the attention of the American people, as it should; this is a difficult war and it’s a tough war. But as I have consistently stated throughout this presidency, it is a necessary war to secure our peace.

I find it interesting that as this young democracy has taken hold, radicals and extremists kill innocent people to stop its advance. And that ought to be a clear signal to the American people that these are dangerous people and their ambition is not just contained to Iraq. Their ambition is to continue to hurt the American people. My attitude is we ought to defeat them there so we don’t have to face them here, and that we ought to defeat their ideology with a more hopeful form of government.

We hate to pick on the President just a few days after another female activist, almost as scary looking as Helen Thomas, threatened to assassinate him (nonviolently). Nobel Peace Prize winner Betty Williams has made similar threats in the past. Isn’t Peace Movement humor a hoot? Leftist perversity has no bounds.

Invoking the United Nations for cover was embarrassing. Apparently, the conflict is with ‘radicals and extremists’ and ‘dangerous people’ who want to ‘kill innocent people’ and ‘hurt the American People’. We will defeat them ideologically through ‘a more hopeful form of government in Iraq’. Imagine Roosevelt cooking up a scheme to defeat the Nazis through a more hopeful regime in Italy. Yea, that would have worked!

In his response Bush also mumbled incoherently about something being evident in Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories. What might that be?

Mr. Bush, in line with many Conservative intellectuals, believes that, as was the case with the Soviet Union, Western culture will prevail, if only Muslims could see it in action. Sorry, we just don’t buy it. The Islamists had experienced our culture in action and rejected it.

Hassan al Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 specifically to oppose the ascendancy of Western ideas in the Middle East. Sayyed Qutb, the Brotherhoods intellectual giant, started out with Western tendencies but returned to true Islam after two years of exposure to American culture (1949 – 51). He found Western society hopelessly materialistic, corrupt, morally loose, and ridden with injustice. Osama bin Laden continues the work of Banna and Qutb. Al Qaeda, Hamas, Fatah, and Islamic Jihad are the Brotherhood. They “know” that their way of life is superior.

Bush’s core belief, that given the opportunity, all human beings will choose freedom over totalitarianism, may be true. It is also irrelevant. The choice Muslims face is not between freedom and oppression. It is between Western decadence and Islamist discipline; between a civilization on its demographic death-bed (weak horse) and a virile people on the rise; between freedom of choice and comfort of certainty; between Hollywood and Paradise.

Muslims believe that Islam, submission to Allah, is freedom.

Karen Hughes, the President’s confidant, is charged with winning hearts and minds in the Muslim world. Congress approved more than $100 million to launch Al Hurra, an Arabic language satellite television network, to balance al Jazeera’s poison.

How is Karen doing? Al Hurra was hijacked by a former CNN executive and graduated to spewing viler anti-American venom than Al Jazeera. Apparently, to be competitive in the Arab world, Al Hurra had to tow the Islamist line. It is what the consumers demand.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. In the Muslim world, the Islamists’ message outsells Bush’s by orders of magnitude. Osama bin Laden is by far the most popular Muslim leader, with 70% market share. Even in the West, particularly in Europe, more people are joining radical Islam than leaving it.

Bush behaves as if Islam is unarmed in the arena of ideas. In fact the Saudis, of which al Qaeda is but a sect, have been on the attack for decades, have already planted ideological colonies in the West, and are in fact winning.

If Bush was a master of ideological warfare he would have, immediately after 9/11, shut down all Wahhabi mosques in the USA. Instead he coddles up to American apologists for radical Islam and welcomes the Wahhabi (hate) Centers that are popping up in neighborhoods all over America.

With all due respect, Bush’s plan to reform Islam is simply not going to work.

In a Washington Times column, “What were they thinking?“, Frank J Gaffney Jr. expresses similar sentiments.

Even President Bush, who understands that we are confronting a new and toxic ideology that extends far beyond Iraq, nonetheless systematically fails to practice the first principle of counter-ideological struggles: delegitimate your enemies. Instead, the president and his minions persist in holding meetings with, hiring, being influenced by and otherwise embracing Islamists in America. The effect is palpable. Those aligned with, if not actually working for, our foes are empowered at the expense of anti-Islamist Muslims, advancing the formers’ bid to dominate their community, a crucial first step toward their stated goal of world domination. Our successors will find such wholly counterproductive behavior to be inexplicable, as indeed it is.

There is one small consolation for those whose conduct will be seen by coming generations to have contributed in these ways to the mortal imperiling of the Free World: History is written by the victors. Unless we awaken to the true nature and magnitude of our peril, stop pandering to a democratic people’s reflexive desire to recoil from deadly conflict if at all possible and adopt the sort of comprehensive war footing that has long been in order, the victors may be appreciative of those who played a part, however small or unintended, in enabling totalitarianism at last to vanquish freedom.

The Islamists are busy recruiting Jihad warriors without end. They are well financed by petrodollars. They send their youth to Western Universities for what amounts to the most massive knowledge and technology transfer in human history. They will use whatever weapons are available to them. And their divine mission is to exterminate us.

This will be a long and bloody war. Don’t cry for the enemy. Save your tears for our own. There will be much sorrow in our children’s lifetime and beyond. God have mercy on us all.