Peter Krupa

I hadn’t been actually afraid of the American Right until recently. But things are converging, pieces of the puzzle clicking into place. First you had a bait-and-switch to get us into a war with no clear purpose or mission. Then you have these signing-statment things. Then you have wire taps, spying on people without warrents, and the Attorney General of the United States of America saying things like, “There is no express grant[ing] of habeas [corpus] in the Constitution, there is a prohibition against taking it away.”

And that means - what?

Now it comes out that the executive branch wanted to fire and replace all 93 of the country’s U.S. attorneys. And that was a suggestion made by Harriet Miers, Bush’s hapless and bat-shit-crazy Supreme Court appointee.

Finally, there’s this review by Andrew Sullivan of Dinesh D’Souza’s The Enemy at Home. You need to sign up on the New Republic Web site to read it, but it’s worth it. I’d read a few reviews of D’Souza’s book already, but Sullivan’s gave me shivers:

Islamist societies are paragons of social meaning and cohesion. Women know their place; homosexuals are invisible; blasphemy is illegal; pornography is banned; modesty is enforced. “My two grandmothers,” D’Souza assures his possibly nervous female readers, “were both tyrants who ruled over their husbands. Patriarchy doesn’t make women less powerful–it merely diverts their power to the domain of the household.” Criticizing Muslim countries for forcing women to wear a veil or a burka in public is to put on the “blinders of ethnocentrism,” even to indulge in “Islamophobia.” Here is a bigotry that the reli- gious right and the politically correct left may together despise. But D’Souza drives the point home for the sake of the right, not the left: “Many Muslims are convinced that women’s liberation and sexual liberation, of the kind promoted by the cultural left, would be a disaster for their society … would undermine their religion, overturn their moral beliefs, and destroy their traditional families. In believing these things, of course, the Muslims are absolutely correct.”

In the end, this is the logical extreme of social conservatism: We don’t want less government, we want more of it, and we want it to make people good. There’s already a system like that in the world, and it’s called Sharia Law. It was only a matter of time before social conservatives sat up and noticed that this fundamentalist Muslim innovation wasn’t such a bad idea.

Now the real battle lines are being drawn.